TAKKT AG (TTK) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and I warmly welcome you to the Q1 2025 Earnings Call of the TAKKT AG. Furthermore, I'm delighted to welcome TAKKT CEO, Andreas Weishaar; and CFO, Lars Bolscho, who will give us a presentation on the results shortly. [Operator Instructions]. And with this, we are looking forward to the first quarter results, and I hand over to you, Andreas.

Thank you. Welcome to our quarter 1 earnings call, hosting the call together with our CFO, Lars Bolscho, who will give you more details on our financials later on. Our start to the year has been in line with expectations with continued top line stabilization despite a volatile and challenging environment. More on that in a moment. To start off, I will present our key financials in quarter 1 before giving you an update on where we stand with progressing on our new TAKKT Forward strategy. And I will also give you an overview of the status quo and our mitigation measures for the U.S. tariffs. Let's start with an overview on key developments in Q1. We've expected the rather difficult economic environment to continue into the new year and this was confirmed in quarter 1 with manufacturing PMIs remaining in contraction territory and the Restaurant Performance Index relevant for our FoodService division dropping below the 100-point threshold in February. We noted a rising level of uncertainty already before the tariff announcement, which has significantly further increased the volatility in the environment since early April. Despite the environment remaining similarly challenging to last year, we were able to continue our top line stabilization with organic growth improving by almost 4 percentage points to minus 7.6%. This was driven by a strong improvement at FoodService and a more stable development at I&P, while the OF&D division was below the quarter 4 run rate. Here, we continue to see the expected impact from a weak lead generation that we already talked about in our quarter 4 call. And in addition, we also see government spending significantly below prior year. Our gross profit margin came in at 39.8%. This was in line with expectations and is a significant improvement compared to the weak quarter 4. As already mentioned during the quarter 4 call, we still saw impacts from freight, mostly in our U.S. business, in addition to commercial initiatives. The lower gross profit margin and lower top line resulted in an adjusted EBITDA margin of 4.9% compared to 7.4% last year. Here, we continue to execute on effective cost management, while at the same time, making important investments into commercial growth and our operational processes and system performance. After we finished last year with a very strong cash performance, we did some temporary investments into our inventory to safeguard our delivery capacity. This means that on free cash flow, we had a cash out of EUR 5 million which will turn significantly positive in the coming quarters with continued improvements in cash generation and the sell-down of inventories we have built up in recent months. Before addressing the tariff topic, let me give you a brief refresher on our recently announced TAKKT Forward strategy and what we currently are working. On focus, our objective is to build on our strengths and unlock the full potential of our most profitable businesses. In recent weeks, we have streamlined an interconnected TAKKT AG and I&P organizational structure, allowing us to operate even closer to the customer. Across our group, we have progressed in streamlining functions and reallocating resources to improve customer centricity and accelerate decision-making. To name one example, we have refocused our operations function and are implementing regional logistic teams, bringing them much closer to the regional divisions while ensuring global coordination where relevant. This is in line with our experience that logistic networks are being separate in Europe and the U.S. and that there is only limited potential to be gained from establishing a global function different to IT and digital, for example. On growth, we are working very diligently to scale our business with larger customers who have more complex procurement needs. We increased the number of customer visits to operate closer to the strategic purchases and end users. We closely monitor the different industry dynamics and focused on addressing customers in growing industries and with potential. For example, due to the exposure to the recent defense and infrastructure in Germany. To generate high-quality leads in challenging market environments, we're establishing an outbound telesales center and launched lead generation campaigns via different performance marketing channels, specifically targeting project opportunities. We've already received project opportunities here, for example, to equip new warehouses with shelves and prefab offices. With the lead quality overall above target, we will continue and build on these efforts. Looking at our U.S. activities and FoodServices, in particular, we have talked about our growth initiatives to gain restaurant chains as new customers during our capital market update end of March. A second growth lever is our focus on integrating spare parts into our product range and roll out targeted marketing approach for these products. We're still in an initial phase here, but seeing promising results with realized sales above expectation and good progress with rolling our marketing resources. We are able to realize above-average margins with this business and plan to significantly increase the share well above the 4% we are currently making with these products. And third topic, we're putting an even stronger focus on improving our performance and accelerating our cost and cash management measures. Important, especially in an environment where growth prospects are limited due to market headwinds and where volatility is higher due to tariffs and related uncertainties. To also state one example here, our category management and procurement teams are jointly reviewing our assortment to simplify our product line following the 80/20 approach, as well as to reduce our procurement costs. We prioritize product groups with the highest potential and develop accordingly a product and sourcing actions to realize this potential. We are simplifying our product depth by reducing variance and are renegotiating product pricing and payment terms, both with existing and with alternative suppliers. While early in the process, we have already realized first savings, thanks to these initiatives and expect additional positive contribution here for our gross profit margin and for cash. In addition, as mentioned earlier, we continue to progress with our structural performance actions and related investments in process and system efficiency. Before I hand over to Lars, let me give you an overview of the tariff topic, both on the status quo and our mitigation measures. There's a lot of volatility when it comes to this topic. Most of our products were sourcing locally. That's true for the I&P business in Europe as well as for our U.S. businesses. Still in the U.S., we have around 1/4 of the total purchase volume that we ourselves source from abroad. That's what we are calling direct imports. The majority of this, around 70% is from China and with that potentially impacted by higher tariffs. And we source another 25% of our purchase volume from U.S. suppliers, where relevant parts of raw material or components are imported and where we expect price increases due to tariffs. Here, the China share is lower than with the direct imports at around 50%. As you know, tariff rates vary between country of origin and product type. Looking at our U.S. businesses, we have the highest import quarter at D2G, but at the same time, we benefit from lower tariffs on electronics and on steel and aluminum products for a good part of our D2G imports. NBF and FoodService faced higher rates with the import quarter being a bit higher at NBF than with our FoodService business. Having said this, please be aware that these figures are based on our 2024 purchase volume. With the resourcing that we're implementing and with possible shifts in demand, we expect to have a lower share of imports in this current year. Since the announcement in early April, we have established a tariff management task force with very frequent update calls and best practice sharing between each of our U.S. divisions. We're preparing for different scenarios, including both a continuation of the current tariff levels as well as a potential solution and lower levels. Looking at our mitigation measures. These include price adjustments on the supplier as well as on the customer side. We have already successfully negotiated the burden sharing with many of our international suppliers where they lower purchase prices for products we are sourcing from them. And we're preparing and implementing price increases to push the expected increases in COGS through to our customers. Let me give you some more details here. We are following a flexible and gradual approach based on when we incur the higher costs ourselves and based on what we see from competitors. For indirect imports, we expect to mostly pass on price increases in full to mitigate the margin impact. For direct imports and given competitive dynamics, we expect to pass on the absolute dollar impact and keep absolute gross profit contribution per imported products stable, which would negatively impact our gross profit margin. For our direct imports from China, we have with some exceptions for specific product groups, temporarily halted deliveries. And at the same time, we are shifting purchase volume to countries with lower tariff rates. We've already been successful here with a volume shift of around USD 10 million from China to other countries, including Vietnam and Thailand for FoodService and NBF. As you can see, we've prepared and implemented a broad range of mitigation measures and feel well prepared for the new situation. At the same time, this is a significant challenge for our business, and we also have to see what the macro impact from the tariff announcement will look like in the coming months. We already see slightly weaker order intake in the last weeks than originally expected at the beginning of the year. We, therefore, implement additional cost management measures that we will push through in quarter 2 and quarter 3. And with that, over to Lars for a more detailed view on our financials in Q1.

Thank you, Andreas, and welcome, everybody. Let's have a closer look now at our financials for the first quarter, starting with TAKKT Group. Sales in the first quarter were 6.5% below prior year at EUR 251.1 million (sic) [ EUR 251.5 million ] after EUR 269 million in the first quarter of last year. We had two impacts in sales to adjust for, a positive currency impact of 1.4 percentage points and a negative impact from the sale of MyDisplays, which accounted for 0.3 percentage points on TAKKT alone. Adjusted for those impacts, organic growth was at minus 7.6%. As Andreas has already mentioned, despite a challenging environment in the first quarter, this is a continued stabilization, continued as we already saw this trend of negative growth rates getting smaller over the course of the third quarter and fourth quarter of last year. Anyhow, growth is still negative in all of our three divisions. Office Furniture & Displays was performing at the weakest level in the first quarter, while Industrial & Packaging and also FoodServices were improving versus the fourth quarter of last year. Let's continue with profit development on group level. Reported EBITDA was below prior year at EUR 11.2 million after EUR 16.8 million last year. Biggest negative impact in our profit bridge continues to be the lower sales with a profit impact of minus EUR 7.2 million. Gross profit margin was at 39.8% compared to 41.2% in the first quarter of 2024 contributing a negative delta of minus EUR 3.4 million to the lower EBITDA. Some of this negative delta versus prior year in gross margin was expected as we were having still a comparatively high gross margin last year in first quarter, especially at Office Furniture & Displays. And we had talked about some negative freight impact in our Q4 call, and had shared with you the expectation that some of the negative freight effects would continue into Q1 to a certain degree. Not expected, but a way lower impact compared to the freight topics were some commercial initiatives, leading to slightly lower gross margins in Q1. We work on countermeasures. At the same time, the gross margin for the rest of this year will probably be impacted quite significantly by the tariff situation in the U.S. On costs, we continued to realize savings on personnel and other costs compared to prior year. On personnel costs, we decreased cost by EUR 2.5 million. And on marketing and other costs, we saved a bit less than EUR 1 million. More to come in terms of cost savings in 2025, as mentioned earlier in this call. Onetime costs, mainly from personnel changes were lower than last year in the first quarter at EUR 1.2 million compared to EUR 3 million last year. We expect higher levels over the course of this year. With this, we generated a reported EBITDA of EUR 11.2 million and 4.4% of sales. The profitability on adjusted EBITDA was at 4.9%, clearly below prior year, where we were at 7.4%. Comparing to prior year, the main contributor to the lower profit margin was the lower gross profit margin and higher cost ratios despite the saving on costs I've talked about. Overall, the adjusted margin for the first quarter was as expected when we started into this year still at a low level with less than 5% and also below our full year target margin. The main reason is that sales was still on a comparatively low level. In addition, some of the positive impacts out of the performance activities in 2025, such as the intensified cost savings, we expect to come into the P&L later in the year. Let's now look at our three divisions, starting with Industrial & Packaging, I&P, the core and also the strongest part of our portfolio. On sales, we saw a continued stabilization with organic decline now at minus 5.7% in the first quarter despite the environment remaining challenging. For us, this is a confirmation that we have initiated the right measures last year and are now improving step by step. Looking at our different regions within I&P, we still saw double-digit decline in our German home market, not really surprising given the environment and sentiment here, but we are also seeing markets with better development, for example, in the Nordics and in U.K. where we were only slightly below prior year in the first quarter. Looking at profit. Gross profit margin was below prior year by 1.3 percentage points and impacted by the commercial decision to support business, larger customers, also bigger orders with some more aggressive pricing, accounting for approximately 2/3 of the lower gross margin versus prior year. In addition, we also had some expected higher freight costs out of price increases at I&P, overall, and this is important to mention, still a good and healthy gross margin level of more than 42%. Adjusted for onetime costs, we have spent less on personnel, marketing and other costs compared to the first quarter of last year. Despite those savings, cost ratios were slightly above prior year. Onetime costs didn't have much of an impact in the first quarter this year compared to an amount of EUR 2 million last year. So this helped reported EBITDA at I&P this quarter. On adjusted EBITDA, we have then generated a margin of 9.7% compared to 12.2% last year. As I've just explained, coming from the lower gross profit margin and due to sales decline being higher than the cost savings, leading to slightly higher cost ratio, despite the comparatively low sales level, we are able in I&P to realize a profitability's in a good high single-digit area. Let's now get to our division Office Furniture & Displays, OF&D and start with sales development here as well. On reported sales, we saw the impact of the MyDisplays divestment here with a minus 1.4 percentage points while currency effects helped us by 2.8 percentage points. Organic growth, this means we were at a minus 13.7%. And in contrast to the other two divisions, below the run rate of the fourth quarter of last year, which was at that time a minus 12.1%. While D2G continued with a slight improvement quarter-over-quarter, the development at NBF was more challenging in the first quarter. We've talked last year already about the impact from the changed marketing approach and positioning of the brand on lead generation at NBF which continues to play a role. And in addition, but still a lower impact on the overall OF&D numbers, we also saw a very weak development of government orders out of the DOGE activities in the U.S. Our federal government business was declining in the first quarter with around minus 30%. On profit, as expected, we saw a lower gross profit margin of 42.1% after a 44.8% last year. The lower gross margin level versus prior year was to a large degree, deliberately adjusting the very high margin of last year to a more sustainable level. Looking into the drivers of gross profit margin. We continued to have freight-related impacts. Inbound freight was higher than prior year due to higher container costs. Also, outbound freight cost ratios were higher to some degree still due to the impacts we had talked about in Q4, which were more split shipments and nonoptimal freight distances. As I said before, we had plans to be on a lower gross margin level compared to prior year. And have, therefore, not pushed although all cost increases to higher sales or higher freight prices. On costs, we see significantly lower expenses in personnel and marketing costs, while other costs are around prior year level. Overall, a good level of cost management activities at OF&D to compensate weaker sales development. Onetime costs were not having much of an impact in Q1, neither this year nor last year. The challenging top line development and the lower gross profit margin was then reflected in an adjusted EBITDA margin of 2.6% compared to 5.5% last year. This is clearly a disappointing profitability level, and we are working on improving on this in the upcoming quarters. Let's now look at our third division FoodService, starting with sales development. We've talked in our Q4 call about our expectations to see continued improvement as our measures, for example, bringing our call center business back on track gaining traction. And we are happy that we can show a quarter-over-quarter improvement now coming from minus 19.5% versus prior year in Q4, up to now a minus 6.2% organic growth in the last quarter. Looking at the profit side. On gross profit margin, we saw a slight improvement from 29.9% last year to a 30.4%, a reasonable and expected level. And with that, also a gross profit margin level, which significantly improved versus the last quarter of 2024. On costs, we see personnel costs on prior year's level as we had focused last year to fix our internal challenges and also brought in some needed resources, for example, in the sales area. And we saw higher marketing spend. The higher marketing spend was partly due to a mix effect, more concrete due to an increased share of business we sold via marketplaces. This marketplace business comes with higher marketing costs, but it helps us to sell off all the inventory and is also a good contribution to our overall marketing and sales mix. Due to the increase in cost rates just mentioned, we ended up with an adjusted EBITDA margin of only 1.0%. Still, the lowest profitability in our portfolio, and we are definitely not happy with this level. This means we have a significant way to go in order to bring up profitability at FoodService in the upcoming months. Let's now continue with cash generation in the first quarter for TAKKT Group. Our cash flow before change of net working capital. The first line here was EUR 9.4 million and declined versus last year in line with EBITDA due to lower top line and gross profit margin. Regarding net working capital, we substantially released net working capital last year in Q1 of 2024. We were benefiting from adjustments to clearly weaker business development at that time and also from realizing structural improvements in cash conversion. This year, we temporarily invested into net working capital, especially in inventory with our U.S. businesses. Part of this is that we increased our inventory levels in order to have higher safety stocks and in order to being able to fulfill customer orders with the appropriate service levels. Looking at the current uncertainties around tariffs and supply chain, this should help us in the upcoming weeks and months. And some of the increase is also due to prepayments connected with our efforts to shift some of our direct import volume to other countries than China. Together with a demand still on a lower level, this led to inventory increasing compared to end of 2024. As said, we are confident that this will help us going forward. The impact out of inventories was, as you can see, the main contributor for the increase in net working capital of a bit less than EUR 9 million in the first quarter. Last year, we had released more than EUR 14 million for net working capital, at that time, mostly out of change in inventory and increased trade payables. So cash flow from operating activities was significantly below prior year in the first quarter and EUR 0.7 million compared to EUR 27.8 million last year. CapEx was slightly lower than the first quarter last year and payment of lease liabilities didn't change. In total, this resulted in a free cash flow of minus EUR 5 million after the first 3 months. Despite the fact that we continue to work on further structural improvements in cash conversion, we had indicated that we expect the full year 2025 below the strong cash year of 2024. At the same time, we will improve in the upcoming quarters significantly versus the first quarter. For example, by selling down the inventory we built up in Q1 and by continuing with our structural improvements in cash generation and the decrease in cash conversion cycle. Looking at our balance sheet, I can keep it relatively short here since not a lot has changed compared to December of 2024. Net financial liabilities remained at a very low level of EUR 117.8 million, whereof approximately half is consisting of lease liabilities and the other half of bank debt. Equity ratio remained with 59.1% almost unchanged at the upper end of our target range of 30% to 60%. That means we continue to have a very strong and healthy balance sheet. Before I hand over back to Andreas for the outlook. Let me quickly summarize our financial performance in the first quarter. Environment continued to be challenging in sales with still negative growth versus prior year. This was for the first quarter in line with our expectations and stabilized and less negative than in the quarters before. On profitability in the first quarter, we were not where we want to be for the full year. As planned, we will work on both improving the top line and also continue to work on cost reductions. The latter even more pronounced with the current uncertainties in the economic environment, especially in the U.S. Cash flow has been impacted by investments into inventories, while we continue to progress with our structural improvements. After a very strong 2024 cash flow, we were on negative absolute level for the first quarter, and we expect to turn positive again in the second quarter. And just to be clear, while most of the developments in Q1 were in line with our expectations, this is, of course, far from where we want to be. We continue to work on improving sales growth and profitability as well as cash flow. And we expect results out of that in the coming months. And with this, back to you, Andreas.

Thank you, Lars. Let me now give an update on what we expect the coming months. First, for the environment and second, for the priorities we set. We expected the economic environment to remain volatile. And as you all know, this assumption turned out to be right. Indeed, we see increased macro uncertainty due to the tariff shock. Forecasts for GDP growth have come down in recent months. As I explained earlier, we prepared for the direct impact of the tariffs on our U.S. business. And while we are prepared for different scenarios, this is still a significant additional headwind that we have to deal with. We hope and expect that there will be a solution and to compromise, especially between the U.S. and China agreeing on lower rates and providing required [indiscernible] certainty for companies. Still, even if there is such a solution, we could see a negative impact on order behavior from customers in the U.S. and to a lower extent in Europe. We have shared that order intake in March and April was somewhat below our initial expectations as customers took longer to make investment decisions. we're not seeing a deterioration, but the positive month-on-month trend from last year has become more volatile. This does include the U.S., where in addition to tariff impact, we also see a continuation of a more restrictive government spend. Still, there are also bright spots visible for us to go after. For example, in defense, infrastructure and life science, and we will continue to focus on customers in these markets in particular. In this challenging environment, we stick to our priorities while also remaining flexible and adapt to changing situations in terms of tariffs or other factors. We continue to rigorously execute our new strategy with a clear focus on our attractive core business, I&P. I already spoke about what we are currently working on at the beginning of this call. We also focus very much on tariff mitigation, and we will adjust our measures depending on how the situation develops. We continue to expect to see improving growth rates over the course of the year to get to a positive growth. And as we outlined in our strategy, we are implementing commercial initiatives in all three divisions and improving our ability to execute. We are intensifying our cost management measures with a focus on structural cost improvements as well as short-term cost and spend management actions while continuing to invest in process and system improvements for higher efficiency, both needed in our situation. And last but not least, we are further strengthening our cash generation capabilities through a set of specific actions and dedicated teams, we continue to work on improving DIO, DPO and DSO. For the 2025 outlook, you've seen that we've confirmed our full year expectations for sales, profitability and free cash flow. This confirmation is based on the expectation that there will be a solution or compromise that leads to lower tariff rates, especially between China and the U.S. and also not a further escalation of trade conflicts globally. Let's start with sales. Here, we expect a continued stabilization of organic sales development over the course of the year. We went into the year with the understanding that quarter 1 and, to some extent, also quarter 2 will still be affected by internal topics. Externally, we now see signs of a more restrained order behavior in quarter 2. With improvements in the second half of the year out of our commercial measures, we continue to expect organic sales growth for the full year between minus 4% and plus 6%. On profitability, we expect between 6% and 8% adjusted EBITDA margin for this year. As I said, we're intensifying our cost management measures in the coming weeks and months. And an additional driver is the sales development, which we expect to increasingly benefit from our growth initiatives and commercial measures and improve in the second half of the year. With intensified internal cost measures, we might also see a somewhat larger amount for onetime costs than initially expected. On cash, we will continue to work on measures to improve our cash conversion cycle and expect to be able to reduce it another 5 to 10 days in 2025. We have temporarily invested in net working capital in quarter 1. We expect this to turn around as we sell down inventory and realize positive cash contribution from releasing net working capital. Absolute free cash flow is expected to be below prior year. In terms of cash conversion, we expect this to come in between 60% and 80% of EBITDA. Thus, overall, the level of economic uncertainty has increased due to the tariffs, adding to the headwind we are already facing. With the rigorous implementation of our growth initiatives, we still expect 2025 to be a year with gradual recovery on the top line. Also, we progressed diligently to improve our overall operational cost and cash conversion performance while making the necessary investments into core capabilities, as I've explained earlier in this call. Before we come to the Q&A, let me briefly talk about our investment highlights. These include a clear portfolio focus addressing attractive markets with high margin potential. Going forward, we will further strengthen I&P as a core. A market-leading position with repeat and long-lasting customer relations, offering opportunities to grow with our customers and beyond, a track record of resilient EBITDA and cash generation with meaningful upside potential. A clear strategy and road map underpinned by targeted investments in our capabilities and the new execution focus, an extensive and continuously growing sustainable offering, providing further growth opportunities. And we combine our track record of attractive and reliable dividends with the shareholder-oriented capital allocation. And with that, we're happy to take your questions. Over to the operator for the Q&A.

Thank you, Andreas and Lars, for your presentation and the dive into your first quarter. So we are now open for your questions, dear participants. [Operator Instructions] Let's start with Christian Bruns. So Christian, you should be able to speak now.

Yes. I have a question on this place to go business because you put it under a strategic review. Could you give us here an update on the strategic review, where do you stand? And the second question is on the inventory side, the higher inventories, are they only related to the U.S. businesses? Or is it also partly -- is also the European business partly affected?

Yes. Christian, thank you for your question. I would start with the inventory piece. So yes, your assumption is right. The higher inventories we are seeing are, in fact, coming almost completely out of our U.S. business. In both divisions, we see that at OF&D and also in FoodService. And as we had said, we were a bit stretched on service levels at the end of last year, and then we saw the uncertainties coming up. In fact, now in April, uncertainties are even higher than when we made those purchase decisions. But anyhow, we did that. And we are quite confident, especially as you asked that this is in the U.S. we are very confident that we can sell off those higher inventories in the course of the year because we now have the advantage of having inventories into -- possibly in comparison to lower costs and prices. And we also have those products available and can sell them whatever the supply chains will do in the upcoming weeks and months. So that should be an advantage for us.

As far as the D2G strategic review that we communicated at our Capital Markets Day is concerned, Christian, we're making solid progress here. Please give us a little more time to formally conclude this review and then also come back to you and fellow investors with our final decision. Having said that, we are continuing to execute on the very solid strategy that we have put in place together with the team and are continuing to see good progress on addressing our growth and performance potentials.

Thank you, Christian. So unfortunately, you're a bit or not that good to understand. So just give us a sign if you have further questions. So in the meantime, we will move on with the person who dialed in with the phone. Sir, please introduce yourself to us.

Yes. Hello. This is Miro Zuzak from JMS Invest. Can you hear me?

Yes, we can.

Okay. You mentioned in your comments that the orders have slowed down during the last weeks and potentially since the Liberation Day of the U.S. that's probably what you are seeing, can you qualify that a bit by how much? And because we have seen different behaviors from different companies. Some basically said that orders they were -- there were more or less a complete halt of orders because of prepurchasing, there was a lot of anticipation of these tariffs. And after the tariffs kicked in, basically orders halted. But in your more granular business, that's probably not the case. So maybe you can [ qualify ] this order behavior. That would be the first question. And then I have another one.

Okay. Great. Thank you for the question, Miro. As I've already shared with you, order intake in recent weeks was below our initial expectation, when we started into the year, right? And as you pointed out, I don't think that's really surprising given the environment we're operating in. Order intake in March and April, what you asked about specifically, we see at a similar level to January and February. So not a deterioration, but also not an improvement that we've initially expected. Looking at our individual divisions, there's not really much of a shift between the divisions with FoodService being the exception and continuing to show some improvement versus the previous run rate. All three divisions remain as we outlined in negative territory, but FoodService only slightly below prior year.

Okay. Did I get this right? So basically, in April, the order behavior and patterns remained the same in the U.S. despite the tariff announcement?

Broadly speaking, yes, right? We're seeing obviously more volatility, right? As we pointed out, we're seeing some of the larger orders taking more time to take decisions, but we did not see a major deterioration.

Okay. Super. And the second question would be, you still now were in negative territory basically regarding organic growth, now at minus 7.6% after minus 16.5% last year in Q1. Now in Q2, the base becomes a bit easier after minus 19% last year. Will you -- do you think in Q2, you will be already able to get into positive organic growth territory again? Or will it take Q3 or even Q4?

So you're correct, right? We're working against a base that is -- has deteriorated in the second half, specifically of last year, right, where we worked against this with diligent commercial activities. Having said that, also from a year-over-year perspective, right, 2024 versus prior year also saw impacts because of the weaker 2023 already. Now having said that, into your original question, I would expect that we will see movement towards positive growth territory and of the quarter, i.e., more towards quarter 3. Now also -- this is with a caveat that obviously, there is a significant volatility around. We're really focusing on what we can control, and this is our own commercial actions as well as our own performance-improvement actions.

Okay. And the last one for the moment would be again regarding the U.S. tariff and its impact. So you have on the Slide 5 of your presentation, on the right-hand side, under the mitigation measures, you have as the first and second point, basically a implementation of price increases because of the tariffs. What's the volume sensitivity to those tariffs? So what volume impact will you expect because of increasing prices or increased prices after these measures have been implemented?

So what we -- we were really taking a differentiated approach here, right? As we pointed out, by working with our suppliers by implementing price increases as well as actively resourcing product to lower tariff countries. And we've made some good progress here. Now looking at the impact we're seeing in U.S., right, and we feel very transparent on this. The way we look at price increases is twofold. So for product we source locally. We're passing on the price increases directly, as we receive them from suppliers that are based in the U.S., however, they also obviously, to some extent, have imported product or components that come in at higher cost. For product we are directly importing, we are looking very closely what competition is doing, and we are introducing and have introduced price increases on most impacted products and categories. And we do this in close monitoring of what the overall market sentiment is, right? So far, we have not seen a major deterioration in our top line, on this from these recent price increases.

So we will now proceed with Christian Bruns, so please go ahead with your question.

Yes. Again, so I have two questions, one on Germany, on the Industrial & Packaging business, they -- you have seen double-digit decreases in sales momentum in Q1. And we elected a new government, and I could imagine that before that, there was a time where -- which burdened maybe. And could you see some recovery here when we now -- when the new government might form now into the next -- I think, next week? Would there be some kind of improvement in sentiment? What do you expect here? And the second question on the U.S. I mean -- I think I understood your mitigation of risks. But there is one question which I would address additionally. And what do you think would be the risks to sit on expensive inventories when the tariffs are lowered again? So if you now buy on this higher level and is there a risk to -- even if everything becomes good again and the tariffs are lowered to a good level, is there a risk that you then sit on expensive inventories?

So let me take the first question and for the second one, I'll pass over to Lars. You're correct, right? We have noted and obviously closely following the recent release of the debt break or the special funds that are being made available for infrastructure as well as defense business within Germany, and these were also some of the bright spots we mentioned earlier. We do see specifically for defense a good potential in Germany but also in the markets and are steering our sales teams accordingly. Similarly, for infrastructure-related companies which we expect also to benefit from this. Overall, we saw -- we noted that the PMI did not go down too much, right? It is still in contraction territory. But I think that also with the new government forming, with clarity now coming and this investment program getting legs and moving forward that we expect some positive momentum coming.

And Christian, on your question on the inventories. Of course, yes, you're right. I've mentioned our opportunity now with having like goods and inventory to still like lower prices that we can sell off. If -- when our tariffs are getting in, of course, we will be and have to be very cautious how much to source them. At the same time, and we have mentioned that, so far, we don't have any risk because -- or only a very, very small one because when the tariffs came like into reality and were implemented, we have almost completely stopped and postponed our purchases from China. So currently, we don't do that. We expect that there will be some kind of yes, reset out of the negotiations around tariff. And then depending on how high the tariffs will then be, we will then decide how much we again source out of China. And if tariffs remain high, we will probably do that on a very, very low level to not run into that risk.

Thank you so much for your questions, Christian. So in the meantime, we have received no further questions. So this is the final call. So if there's still topics you would like to discuss just let us know. So -- but it appears everything is answered. No, so we have Miro again.

Yes. I have another one regarding basically the improvement in EBITDA. And please excuse my ignorance if you have already elaborated on this but just quickly. So from the, let's say, 5-ish to the 7-ish that you're guiding, could you please tell me again how much will come from no volume effect? How much will come from gross profit effect and how much comes from the OpEx improvements that you are targeting like the cost improvements? I mean really roughly, the idea is not to get the basis point, but to really to get a feeling about what you feel.

Yes, and fair question. So if we compare and I would compare the two halves of the year, but because we have some already indicated that Q2 now with a bit -- still maybe a bit lower demand, will still be on the lower side. So if I compare the two halves of the year, we have to increase by around 2.5 percentage points around that level. Gross margin, like will -- more on profitability percent of sales will more be a negative impact because we will -- in the U.S., we will protect our absolute gross profit but that will have some negative impact on gross margin. So gross margin could be depending on the tariff around 1 percentage point lower in the second half compared to the first half. But that depends heavily on what the reset of the tariffs will be. On the improvement, and that's the more important piece. We have, indeed, as you said, let's say, two buckets of improvement. The first one is improving on sales, getting back into growth territory in the second half. This accounts for approximately half of the improvement we envisioned for the second half and the other half is coming out of our cost improvements, which is in sales and marketing cost ratio where we want to improve our efficiency again compared to what we see in the first quarter. And also a very important structural cost improvements Andreas has talked about. I'm always talking adjusted profitability because also with the more focus on cost measures, our one-offs will probably also be a bit higher in the second half of the year. But on adjusted, it's approximately half of growth and half of cost improvements.

Thank you for your follow-up question. So now I think everything is answered so far, and that means we will come to the end of today's earnings call. But should further questions arise at a later time, please feel free to contact Benjamin and Nadine from Investor Relations. And also a big thank you to you, Andreas and Lars, for a detailed presentation and the time you took today. So to all of you have a lovely remaining week. And with this, I hand back to Andreas for some final remarks, which concludes our call for today.

Thank you for your time and interest in TAKKT. Our next earnings call will be on July 29 when we publish the half year report. Looking forward to welcoming you then. Have a great day.