We ready to start? Welcome, everybody, to Ascom's 2025 full year results conference, and also welcome to the participants that we have on the webcast.

Our plan for today, according to the agenda, which maybe is going to show in a minute. There we go.

First, Michael Reitermann, who was our CEO ad interim from September of last year to February to the beginning of February of this year. He's also a delegate of the Board of Directors, will take you through the results and the highlights of 2025.

Thereafter, I will go through the financials in more detail. Afterwards, David Hale, our CEO as of February of this year, will show you the outlook and the guidance.

Finally, we will present our proposal to the general assembly regarding the distribution to shareholders. We will take your questions in the end.

We will start first with the people who are present at the conference, and thereafter we will take questions from the webcast. Many thanks.

Michael, over to you.

Kalina. Oops.

Put that down here. Warm welcome also from my side.

I'll give you the business update, Ascom 2025. We start with the key financials.

Probably most of you have already looked at them, 2025 at a glance. I also want to mention here our improved operational performance in all segments and regions.

I will give a couple of examples later on on a slide how we have achieved that, and also some metrics along that. The net revenue increased to 292 million, which was an increase of about 3.8 percentage points at constant currencies.

The incoming orders increased to 311 million, 3.2% in constant currencies. The EBITDA grew to 34 million, a considerable increase versus 2024 of about 60%.

The margin improved from 7.4 to 11.7%. Net profit, also quite an increase from 3.7 to 15.1 million.

The equity ratio is at 40%, and net cash at close to 30 million. Now, after having given you the highlight financials, let's look what drives our markets.

The secular growth drivers continue to trend positively for our businesses. I will just give you a few concrete examples.

Demographic change, everybody knows about it. Statista quotes in December 2025 by 2030, all baby boomers in the United States will be 65 plus years old, including myself.

That means one out of five Americans is in retirement age. When you look at staff shortages, Euronews reported in May of 2025 that across the European Union, healthcare systems face a shortage of more than 1 million staff.

That's physicians, that's nurses, that's caretakers. The consumerization of the patient, just one data point: in 2024, in our time this is almost a century ago, 70% of the internet users actually were looking for medical information on the internet.

That means that our healthcare providers face more and more educated consumers. That of course also they have to adapt to.

When we look at care anywhere, there is a BioSpace study in the United States where they said that the US home healthcare services market was about 130 billion in 2021, and it's expected to almost double by 2030. When we talk about healthcare digitalization, there was a McKinsey article from summer 2024 where they reference the global survey of 200 healthcare executives, and 85% said that digital and analytics transformation is either highest priority or one of their top priorities.

Unfortunately, in the same study, 75% said that they don't allocate enough resources to those trends. Last but not least, which we sometimes forget in that environment, are the regulatory demands.

Last summer, an AHA, the American Hospital Association, published a paper that said that health systems and hospitals must comply with more than 600 discrete regulatory requirements and spent more than $40 billion in trying to fulfill them. Now, on the next three slides, I will talk about our three core segments: acute care, long-term care, and enterprise.

I want to give you a picture, how do we view those segments. The first one is, of course, we still have the major market dynamics, secular growth drivers that I just outlined.

Another trend is, in Europe, but especially also in the US, the consolidation of hospitals, groups getting larger and larger. Later on, I tell you about an example of our customers where they have 40 plus hospitals and clinics.

They also move from a reactive care to proactive care. If you can prevent the deterioration of somebody in an ICU or somebody in a ward, that is reducing length of stay, and it's also reducing the cost for the healthcare system.

Now, what do we do in the acute care segment? We are becoming the hospital management system for insights and action.

That we do with our solutions in alarm management, clinical surveillance, and decision systems, and our classical nurse call systems. This will allow our hospital customers to have higher efficacy and better efficiency.

When you go to the right side, the focus here is, of course, on the high acuity areas. Basically, emergency department, operating room, intensive care environment.

This is where our solutions can really make a difference for our customers. Also in the recovery and general ward area, if you can detect changes in the status of the patient earlier, you can make a difference.

When we talk about long-term care, our second segment in the healthcare arena, again, you see aging population, caregiver shortage are major drivers. Also, people are trying to live longer at their home, and that of course is also kind of an opportunity for us, how do we enable and embrace that.

Here we focus on, as a company, on our solutions where we have the alarm management, activity monitoring, and clinical surveillance. Because if the pattern of a resident, we don't call them patient here, of a resident changes, let's assume they spend more time in bed, they spend more time in the restrooms, they take more frequently showers, these are changes in the behavior and the status of the patient.

If you evaluate them cleverly, you can predict and become proactive in treating those situations of the patients. When we then look on the right side, it's about home care.

This is something which is an opportunity for us. We haven't been strong there, but together with the cheap sensor technologies that you see coming to life, probably some of you have an Oura ring or a WHOOP or a Fitbit, etc., etc.

They're more sophisticated, more clinically proven sensors, and they will make a difference in that segment. Our major areas here are home care, independent living.

I don't know, my mother is in a long-term home care in Germany, and this is not fully utilized because they don't have enough staff. There's a certain ratio of staff to occupants, and if you don't find enough staff, your capacity is only 80 or 75%.

Our technology is at an opportunity to make a difference there as well. The third, but not the last segment is our enterprise segment.

Here the market dynamics are a little bit different from what we see. It's, of course, also staff shortages, but a lot more about remote work.

Workers get stretched in the facilities. You probably have heard also, there is safety concerns, security concerns for people who work alone, whether it's in hospitality, whether it's in transportation or in other segments.

Our solutions, when we talk about alarming, when we talk about mobile communication, those are efficiency improvements and security improvements that will make a difference in the lives of our customers and their employees. When you look on the right side, the different segments, we call them the verticals and the enterprise, we basically play in different markets and different verticals, because we of course analyze where do our solutions have the biggest benefit.

I'll tell you later on a customer example about the secure establishments, which especially in Switzerland has been a good opportunity for us. Now how do we address these three segments?

We do that with eight core capabilities, grounded in one containerized platform. I'll lead you through the eight core capabilities, and you have heard them already, or quite a few of them, in the three segments: acute care, long-term care, and enterprise.

We start with alarm management, clear, workflow management for nurses, for staff in a long-term care home, patient surveillance or resident surveillance, I brought the example: how long are they in bed, where are they in their room, etc., decision systems, communication and collaboration between patient, residents, and nursing staff or lone workers and their central department, and of course, also amongst nurses, analytics and reporting, we talked about the administrative burden, here we can alleviate the administrative burden for our customers, data management, and last but not least, asset tracking with RTLS solutions, etc., etc., is becoming a bigger, bigger driver for us as well. When you can see at the bottom, our elements nurse call, our patient system solutions, and on the right side, mobility, of course, the Myco, our DECT technologies, they are integrated in those solutions.

Also, third-party sensors becoming more and more important because the more you can measure, you can analyze and drive your customer's benefits. On this slide, I also want to talk a little bit about the changes in the organization, which we have made in April 2025, where we streamlined our organization through consolidation and simplified interfaces, which actually enabled us to achieve closer collaboration between departments, across countries, across headquarters into the countries, and allowed for the co-design of efficiency improvement measures, which led actually to quite some improvement of improvements across our customer care and our professional services organizations.

On the left side, you see the improvements 2025: here the project margins, when we implement our solutions in our customer environments, they improved by more than 5 percentage points. The billable utilization of our professional services staff increased by more than 10%.

Then on the customer care side, the average ticket resolution, when there's a service call, you create a ticket, and the average ticket resolution reduced by more than 15%. We also launched a couple of initiatives in Q4 of 2025, which are directed towards the top line.

The first one we call commercial intensity. Here it's about measuring in a consistent framework and managing the performance of our own sales team, but also the performance and the knowledge level of our partners, because in quite a few countries, we have an indirect go-to-market approach.

Then the second one is the enterprise growth segment. Enterprise is an interesting segment for us because the book-to-bill cycle, basically from order to implementation and revenue recognition, is the shortest of the three segments we play in, much shorter than in acute care and also shorter in long-term care.

That's why we started focusing at the end of 2024 and have launched an aggressive lead generation campaign for staff safety, alarm management, and mobility. We are looking forward for that for those activities to yield results in 2026.

Now revenue, we said we grew 4 percentage points in constant currencies from 287 to 292. As you can see, 66% of our revenue come from healthcare.

Here about one-third is long-term care, and in 2025, acute care grew, long-term care was more flat-ish, and then one-third is about enterprise. On the right side, you see how we think about our business.

Of course, number one, winning orders from customers. You saw the two initiatives: commercial intensity and also enterprise the enterprise initiative.

Here it's also important that we have a technological and solutions differentiation, because that allows us to win more orders. You saw in the two, three examples that I gave on the professional services side, on the commercial on the customer care side, that we also improved our processes, whether it's the design of the solution, the delivery of the solution, or then the servicing of the solution.

The better we do that, the more opportunities and the more understanding and the more financial funds we have also to continue to innovate. Because we are in segments where innovation is a must.

With innovative solutions, we of course then start the wheel at the beginning again: we win. I truly believe that our solution portfolio differentiates us from individual solution providers.

I think when we talk about now about a couple of examples, you can see that. These are integrated solutions that we brought to our customers and that made us successful.

We wanted to have an example in the acute care segment, in the long-term care segment, and in the enterprise segment. The acute care segment is from the US.

Here, this is one of those examples where I said earlier consolidation: Ochsner is the largest IDN in the US Gulf Coast. It has about 40 hospitals/clinics under management.

What we have done here, we implemented our Telligence nurse call solution, Unite medical device integration. Those solutions bring the Ochsner team measurable benefits regarding response time, friction, inefficiencies between their medical staff, doctors, nurses, nurses, nurses, and allows them to deliver smarter and more connected care.

The second element is from the long-term care and comes from the UK, our Region North. Here we signed a contract with Nourish Care.

Nourish Care is the UK's leading digital social care provider. Its platform is used daily by more than 400,000 care workers in the United Kingdom.

Here our Ascom nurse call, monitoring, and alarm management combined with Nourish digital care planning solution enables a platform that allows for increased efficiency, increased safety, a better residence experience, and again a reduction of administrative tasks because we can map them digitally. In the first step, the joint teams are targeting approximately 90,000 beds that Nourish has under management.

The last example gets closer to home, in the Canton Zurich. In 2024, we installed our first solution in the secure establishment, Zurich West.

We also told you about it in one of the previous conferences. Here we had now the opportunity to roll out our Ascom solution in eight secure institutions in the Canton Zurich.

Here we basically use our DECT with the Myco 4 technology and multiple software elements containing the integration of technical alarms, staff safety, and especially our prisoner app. That allows staff in the prisons to actually identify inmates, look at their profiles for identification, improves the risk management, and if necessary, can also support the handling of the prisoners.

Just in the last day, we won now our first project outside the Canton Zurich for secure establishment in Switzerland. All of these opportunities that you see here are in the million Swiss franc plus range.

We will continue to look for such opportunities in order to drive the Ascom business. Now, I hand it back to Kalina to give more details about the financials.

Thank you.

Thanks, Michael. Let's go through the financials in more detail.

Starting with an overview of top-line figures and and also profitability and cash flow, we see that incoming orders have increased by 1% in Swiss francs and by 3% in constant currency. Order backlog at 3% in Swiss franc and 6% in constant currency.

Net revenue, we had an increase of 2% in Swiss francs and 4% at constant currencies. This resulted in a very good EBITDA result of where we increased by 61%, and from 7.4% EBITDA margin in '24 to 11.4% in 2025.

Capital expenditure, just taking you to the other end of the graph, decreased from 15.5 to 11.1%, a substantial decrease which is due to lower capitalization that we used to do in the past, but also due to the fact that we completed one refurbishment project in 2024, and we don't have this capitalization anymore in '25. This this is the result what you see in the middle, that the free cash flow improved substantially on the one hand from the better profitability, on the other hand from the lower capital expenditure, and also due to better management of net working capital.

We achieved a free cash flow of 21.8 million. Now starting from the top of our financials, from the top line: incoming orders, the increase of 3.2% in constant currency you can see has an uneven split between projects, products, and services and maintenance and support.

While projects, products, and services remained flat, we could see quite a substantial increase in orders for maintenance and support. This has the positive effect that such orders are quite stable and contribute to recurring revenue at Ascom.

When we look towards the regions, we have now introduced the new group of North, South, and US and Canada. We could see strong order intake in the North, mostly coming from healthcare in Norway, where we see big hospitals groups that invest heavily in digitalization.

Also, we could see strong order intake in Sweden, both from the healthcare and from the enterprise segment. South remained flat as a whole, whereby in the in the individual countries we could see quite some differences.

Here we had a strong development in Germany, but it was compensated by a lower order intake in Switzerland and Australia, most notably. The region USA and Canada remained relatively flat in constant currency, and with the development of the US dollar versus the Swiss franc, this resulted in a negative 6% development of the order intake.

This is predominantly due to the uncertainties that we have in the US healthcare system. The development of the backlog, you can see over year over year.

Over the past four years, we have development of positive 4% in sorry, in Swiss francs and 6% in constant currency. Also in 2025 versus 2024, we have an increase of 5.9% in constant currency and 3% in Swiss francs.

Also an important point that we like to mention is that more than 50% of the order backlog, which we have generated or which we have on the books as of 31st of December '25, is scheduled to turn to revenue in 2026. The net revenue development, 3.8% in constant currencies, was then impacted by currency effect in translating to Swiss francs of 1.9%, and therefore resulted in the 292.1 million revenue in Swiss francs.

Here the recurring revenue element, 27%, was similar to prior year and is at a very good level. Here's some more details towards the split on the one hand versus products, project, and services and maintenance and support, as well as the split from half-year to half-year half-year to half-year comparison.

Starting with the first graph, we see the opposite development of what we had in order intake, namely that we have in maintenance and support a lower increase of 2% in Swiss francs and 4% in constant currency, and in products, projects, and services, similar growth rates. Then we had quite an extraordinary development in 2025 regarding to H1 versus H2 development.

At Ascom, the second half is stronger than the first half. This is typically the case, and was also the case in '24.

In 2025, this effect was much more pronounced. As you can see, in H1 '25, we remained flat to the H1 of '24.

In the second half, we had a substantial growth compared to prior H1 of 5%. Going through the profit and loss statement, here I want to draw your attention to the fact that we could increase gross profit from 46 to 48%.

This is due to the optimizations which were put in place starting end of last year, but also throughout 2025. These optimizations in our service and support organization, and this resulted, due to lower personnel cost, in a better gross profit.

This is despite the fact that we had 1 million of write-offs on obsolete components and also half a million of US tariffs that we paid, which were not there in 2024. I would say we have a very good development on the gross profit level, and this is a level which we aim to maintain.

Going through the other cost items, you see that marketing and sales, we reduced the cost quite substantially. This also had to do with the reorganization and with our new operational setup, and also resulted by largest through personnel through reduction in personnel cost.

Research Research and development, you can see a small increase in the P&L. This is more due to the fact that less projects were capitalized, and therefore they do not appear in the capex on the balance sheet, but then but rather appear here in the profit and loss statement.

Finally, our administration cost was also reduced. This is also due to the efforts to maintain strict cost control.

As a result, our EBITDA margin increased from 7.4 to 11.7%, and this is a result that we are quite happy with. Here a little bit more detail to what I mentioned before regarding the capex development.

You can see in the dark green area the reduction of investments in tangible assets. This is what I mentioned, the refurbishment of the only office which Ascom owns, which is our office in Sweden.

It was finished in 2024, and therefore in 2025, we have only a very low level of, I would say, recurring tangible investments. The area which is light green is intangible capex.

It consists of approximately two-thirds of capitalized R&D developments and approximately one-third of capitalized ERP migration, which we're still continuing. Here is the view of the cash flow.

As I mentioned, we are very satisfied with the development of the operating cash flow, which is 32.6 million in 2025. There you can see also which parts of this operating cash flow were used for for capitalization, for capex, and also for return to shareholders, which here consists of the share buyback of 6.8 million and the dividends of 3.6 million.

Altogether were returned 10.4 million to shareholders from Ascom's cash flow, and this is compared to the 10.8 million in 2024, which was paid as a dividend. Finally, a view to our balance sheet.

We continue to have a robust balance sheet with with a good cash position. We have 40% equity ratio, and basically standing very very very confidently and strongly with a very good financial and financing situation.

Maybe a one point here on the net working capital, because I mentioned an improvement of the net working capital throughout the year, which indeed we achieved. However, we had a very strong revenue development in the months of November and December, and this increased our accounts receivable at the end of December.

This is something which is not evident when you look at the December balance sheet number. However, also here, we're in a very good situation at the moment.

This concludes the financial part, and with this, I would like to hand over to David.

Thanks, Kalina. [German?]

. Good morning.

Very happy to be with you all this morning. Maybe just a couple of points to my background.

I've been with Ascom now for the past five weeks for the second time, because I actually was an intern at Ascom Autelca in Bern, Switzerland 35, almost 35 years ago. I can say I'm happy to be back, totally different activity at the time.

After I left Ascom, I actually went pretty quickly into healthcare, and that's where I've spent more or less the past 25 years. I spent quite a bit of time at GE Healthcare here in Europe, a little bit in the United States, half that time, about 15 years, focused on diagnostic imaging, services, capital equipment, MRI, CT scanners, and then the second half of that time really on the healthcare IT side.

Everything that is radiology IT, cardiology IT, perinatal, perioperative IT systems. Then I left GE Healthcare and joined a pharmaceutical company called Guerbet.

It's a French-based pharmaceutical company, family-owned but publicly listed. I was the CEO of that company for the past six years, and had also a board position with a long-term care chain out of France for a couple of years, and am currently on the board of Ambu, which is a Danish medical device company, also publicly listed, that operates in the area of endoscopy.

Very happy to be here at Ascom now. Just to come back to what Michael had mentioned earlier, I'm not going to go back into the numbers, but I think what's super interesting to recognize here is you have a demographic shift of patients combined with a very big change in how we deliver care.

Those two changes combined is what's really creating opportunities and consistent growth that you're going to see across healthcare for many years to come. Healthcare has the beauty of being a sector that structurally has grown, and will structurally continue to grow, but continue to grow in different areas.

If you just take the US as an example, if you look on the top left, you've got kind of the shift in demographics that Michael was talking about earlier. If you look at the percentage of the population, birth rates are falling, people are living longer.

I have a shift in the percentage of my population that is elderly. If you look at the cost that it takes me to deliver healthcare to an older population, it's kind of, for a healthcare system, the worst of both worlds.

It's a bad segment mix. I've got my most expensive older population, which is actually growing, and this is creating massive margin pressure for healthcare systems.

A recent study was done to look at where are the opportunities to improve the margin of healthcare systems. In the US, we talk all about improving the margin, but even outside of the US, you can talk a lot about how do I have to do more with less resources, because every government around the world is looking to how they decrease healthcare costs in their system: reimbursement costs, overall healthcare system costs.

If you look at the different opportunities, there's actual several areas here where Ascom's portfolio can really add value and bring that value to our customers. If you're talking about clinical workforce management, operating room, inpatient operations, and also in the emergency department.

If I try to translate that into, okay, how should I think about growth for Ascom, where Ascom plays in the market, if you take our underlying solutions, starting with mobility, moving into alarm management, medical device connectivity, and all of those solutions across the system, we can expect over the coming years anywhere between a 4 to a 7% growth in those areas taken at large, where Ascom really has an opportunity to bring something to the table. If we look at 2026, obviously, objective is to continue to deliver profitable growth, but there's three main areas that we're going to be focusing on to do that.

The first one is really to continue to exploit the benefits of this new organization that Michael talked about. We have opportunities now that we're structured as regional organization to better balance resources.

If you think about delivery of projects, service of our customers, previously those were optimized within a country. Now we have the opportunity to better optimize those across the region.

Also focusing on further operational improvements, project implementation efficiency. Michael talked about the improvement in our profitability on the projects.

You can do that through standardization of deployments. I can do that, linked to the first item, also sharing my resources and optimizing those across the region.

You have now many AI tools that I can be using for improving my delivery as well as improving my development. Finally, accelerating our innovation pipeline, and I would also say preparing our commercial and marketing teams to be able to deliver that innovation.

Those are really the three areas that we plan to focus on in 2026 to deliver, continue to deliver that profitable growth. You've seen the guidance, I won't spend a ton of time on that, but what we're saying for 2026: we're going to deliver low to mid-single-digit revenue growth at constant currency and an EBITDA margin of 10 to 12% in 2026.

With that, I will hand it back over to Michael, who will present the proposals for the Annual General Meeting. Thank you.

Thank you, David. Really glad to have you on board, this time on the same side, because we were battling each other for many, many years: me on the Siemens Healthineers side and he on the GE Healthcare side, both in imaging, etc., etc.

Glad that we are now fighting the same fight. Proposals for the Annual General Meeting.

I have switched now my hat, not in ex- ad interim CEO, now I'm a member of the board and will talk about the proposals for the Annual General Meeting. On this slide, I will outline our dividend proposal to the AGM and an update on our share buyback program and what it means for our shareholders.

The board is proposing a dividend of 20 rappen at to the Annual General Meeting. This is based on a group profit of 15.1 million Swiss francs, and corresponding 15.1 corresponds to an earning per share of 43 rappen.

We also have to see that in the concept context of our share buyback program. We will continue to complete our share buyback program in 2026.

We launched it in May of 2025, and as of the end of December 2025, we bought back 1.8 million shares for about 7 million Swiss francs, and together with the 2025 dividend, we returned about 30 rappen per share to our shareholders. In 2026, we expect to repurchase the remaining 1.2 million shares, now at a higher average share price than in 2025, at least we assume that.

That's how we spend probably around 8 million to buy back those 1.2 million shares. Together with the 2026 proposed dividend, we plan to return to shareholder an amount up to 14.9 million Swiss francs, representing up to 45 rappen per share.

That's our proposal to the Annual General Meeting. The other proposal is about the members of the Board of Directors.

As you probably know from the last AGM, or afterwards, Valentin Chapero has decided to not stand for reelection to become a member of the Board of Directors or the Chairman of the Board of Directors. The other five members have decided to stand for reelection.

We propose to the AGM the reelection of the current board members: Nicole Burth, Laurent Dubois, Jürg Fedier, Dr. Monika Krüsi, and myself, Michael Reitermann.

We also propose to the AGM the election of Laurent Dubois as the Chairman of the Board. I end our presentation today with just a glimpse, who is Laurent, Laurent Dubois?

We actually also battled me on the GE Healthcare side for a few years. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Ascom since 2020.

He is a Belgian national, lives in Switzerland. He is the CEO and a member of the board of ADB Safegate, a Belgian-based company which is airport technologies.

When you Google the company, you probably will see that you have interfaced with a lot of their technologies when you are flying. He has a long background in healthcare as well, more than 20 years background in understanding processes on the customer side in the US, in Europe, around the globe with McKinsey, GE Healthcare.

I believe that Laurent has an excellent profile for becoming the next Chairman of Ascom, and that's why we propose him to the AGM. Thank you very much.

I hand it now back to Kalina to lead us through the Q&A.

Thank you, everybody, for your attention. We opened the Q&A session, and first, yes, there was the first question.

Yes, thanks for the presentation. I would have three questions.

The first question is about your mid-term goals. Are they you going to announce them sometime?

Is that planned? Then the second question would be about this big order that you got in December.

Maybe if you could talk a bit more about its nature, its size. Yes, my third question would be about the tariffs.

You mentioned that 0.5 million amount of tariffs you had to pay. Are you going to try to reclaim that, and do tariffs still influence you in any way?

Thank you very much. Regarding the first question, well, probably ask Michael to give an answer, and then I will take questions two and three.

Basically mid-term goals, there are two rationales why we don't right now give mid-term goals. The one is, of course, the global uncertainty.

I think we said that a couple of times. Then of course, also David will have the opportunity to now look at the business and also then make decisions where he wants to take that business.

David, I don't know whether you want to add anything to that, but I think that is why at the moment we will not plan to issue a mid-term guidance.

Fully aligned.

Good. Then

on the big order of the US, we just disclose the following situation: it is a big order that we have already received in 2024, and it is not uncommon for Ascom to receive big orders, which are then delivered over multiples of years. This is nothing unusual.

This particular order was actually in the enterprise segment, but we also have such orders in the healthcare segment, of course. What was a little bit unusual is that a big chunk of this order was asked to be delivered in December, right?

This is something which where we don't usually have a very, very granular visibility, because the customers can decide also at short term to ask us to deliver. This is the situation that we had.

In this sense, it is not a one-off per se, right? Because we have big frame contracts also in other countries.

It is just a little bit unusual in terms of the timing and size. The last question regarding the US tariffs: yes, the impact in '25 of about half a million was in fact lower than what we feared in the beginning.

Our current setup is such that we are partially impacted, but also partially can deliver in the US free from tariff. The situation unfortunately remains dynamic, right?

We have to see how things will develop. Certainly, we will try to claim the tariffs that we have paid.

We have already started first steps in this direction, but also here there is substantial uncertainty whether this will materialize, and also when. What I would expect for this year is that we will continue to be impacted, but in terms of magnitude, I cannot really say it's going to be more or less than what we had in the past, right?

Because right now we're again very low at the 10%, but we do not know how long this is going to last. All that we try is to optimize our supply chain and the timing of our deliveries in the US in such a way that we can be impacted in a minimal way.

The production is made in Mexico for US market?

We import to the US market from various markets. Mexico is one part, but we also import from China, from Thailand, and also some a little bit from Europe, we have various countries where we import.

Sometimes we are exempt from tariffs, and sometimes not. Again, this situation is indeed very dynamic.

We follow it very closely, and we try to optimize as good as we can.

Hiedenbach, AWP. I've got a question regarding your guidance for the current year.

For the EBITDA margin, you guide for 10 to 12%. You had 11.7 in '25.

Given the fact that you also guide for rising sales, low to middle digit, isn't this a bit defense? Shouldn't the margin grow again with raising sales, or is there something special we should keep in mind?

Maybe I give it a first shot, and then Kalina can chime in. We are looking at some first statement, the uncertainties in the market.

We just talked about tariffs. We don't know.

Right now it's the new issue is 10% for 180 days, might be 15%, an increase. It's not the mega number, but we also from an investment perspective are investing in our solutions portfolio.

We basically have in 2025 made good progress on that, but 2026, when we for example say cloud-based solutions, the Nourish solution, the Nourish example that I presented, there we will also make investments in order to integrate into their digital care solution. It is an investment case also on the expense side in R&D.

Then what you saw on the commercial intensity side, we also want to invest in our go-to-market. That means education of our own sales force, but especially also the education of our distribution partners.

Because today, in many cases, we have distribution partners who can sell the low end of our solution portfolio. They sell nurse call, they sell mobility.

We see an opportunity to actually In software, you usually talk about land long land and expand. We are investing also in our distribution channels to be more capable to then upsell, but that is in 2026 an expense item.

There are a couple of investments in the future in 2026, so that we decided to give a wider range and a more cautious range. I don't know, Kalina, whether you want to add something.

I don't think there is much to add to this. I think this is pretty much all.

I think also from our perspective, when we make our forecasts, we see a number of uncertainties, and we just want to remain reasonable, but at the same time a bit cautious.

Yes, hello. Michael Inauen from Secura.

I'm not going back to the EBITDA margin guidance. Would have been my question as well, but maybe you can just try to give us a hint on how much this December delivery actually helped your margin.

It surely helped on the gross profit margin that you had everything in December. Just to understand, if maybe that's the difference that we can look into '26.

Second question is, as far as I remember, you change your setup, or particularly the people in North America, I think about a year ago. In order intake, it looks pretty good.

I'm just trying to understand how successful this new team is, how satisfied are you with these people, and can we look at a more stable environment, Ascom environment in North America? Just an understanding question as the last one: I think you say somewhere in your presentation or in the annual report, 13% of your revenues is software.

I'm just trying to understand what exactly that is. Is that usually attached to something that you sell on the hardware side, or is that generally everything recurring that repeats itself on a software-as-a-service level?

Just to understand, maybe I'm the only one, but I'd like to get it better. Thank you.

Thank you very much. I would then answer the first question, and the second question regarding the development of the US team, Michael, I suggest you answer this one, and then the software percent of revenue, I can start, and then of course you can complement.

On the US, we can say that it impacted our EBITDA margin by a bit less than 1 percentage point. Just in terms of rough estimate.

Then the development of the US team and how we see its progression, I think maybe Michael, you can give your assessment. Yeah.

How should I say that to be diplomatically correct? I think we have a better team in the US.

At the top, but also on the next layer, basically the people who work in the regions with our distribution partners, who, what I said, working on educating them, so that they basically are not only, let's say, infrastructure, facilities people, but they can actually have a clinical discussion. That was clearly identified by the new leadership, probably summer 2020 2025.

We are investing now in that and how do we educate them and train them to have this land-and-expand concept, that we basically are in 20% of the US hospitals with our nurse call, but we don't go to the higher value software solutions. This is one element that was clearly identified by Tobias Staehle.

Then the second one, we also not only on the sales side, but also on the implementation side, we made some I think good choices with new people joining us. Somebody who worked with us on probably some of you know that we have a collaboration with GE in the United States about the digital CMU, Central Monitoring Unit, where you integrate out of, let's say, 10 different hospitals the ICU, so that you basically can leverage the staff, and you don't have to have an ICU observation status site in each hospital.

You can centralize that, that's productivity, etc. He worked in that, and he is now responsible for our professional services and customer care, the two elements I showed earlier where we already made improvement.

I believe we are on a good way in North America. We'll see.

Probably all of you know the OBBA, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. We don't know what that now means for the funding, especially Medicare on the elderly.

We saw that more and more of the people will go in this elderly segment, and you have to have the funding in order to support that, and we don't know yet what impact that will have on the funding situation in North America. A little bit hedging our bets, but I definitely think the prerequisites have improved quite a bit in North America.

Yes, thank you very much. Then the software question: yes, the 13% which we show is in fact consists only of the licenses which we sell, right?

In reality, we usually sell a project, and within this project we have hardware, and we have software, and we have also services which either we deliver ourselves with our technical experts or we have a partner or both, right? In the end, it is a combination of hardware, software, and work.

The part that we here count as software, the 13%, is only the licenses. One can of course argue that if we had not developed the software, we would not be able to deliver the entire project.

We're still thinking of what would be a correct way to demonstrate the value of our software also in the financials. At the moment, we think that this is a transparent way to show it.

Then, yeah, we will consider if there is an alternative to demonstrate how important the software really is for Ascom. I don't know if anybody wants to add.

I would just add that software, thinking about it as the license only, is extremely restrictive, because even you install a software license with someone, even if they buy it as a perpetual license, you still have upgrade opportunities that are pure what we would call professional services work that don't necessarily involve additional software license, but which generate new projects and therefore also new service revenue. There's, as Kalina said, we're kind of looking there's software, and there's software-induced revenue, and how do we look at that better as a whole.

Any other questions? This seems not to be the case.

Then I will go to the question. We have one question in the chat from Dominik Maurer.

He's asking: "Looking on the explanation for the increase in R&D cost of lower capitalization on slide 20, the capitalization was reduced by 1 million, but R&D cost went up by 2.5 million. What is the reason for this?"

Yes, and this is indeed a good observation. There the place in the annual report where we show our R&D expense in terms of cash view, right, which is free of capitalization, but also free of amortization of intangibles, is on page 148 of the annual report.

There, you see that we have an increase of 2.4 million in real R&D expense. From this, 1.4 million you can see in terms of increase in the P&L, and the remainder, 1.1 million, is a reduction in the capex.

What we also have here is a certain complexity comparing year on year, and also certain complexity that you have with various FX rates. Basically, this is where you can see the full picture of what of the R&D expense and its development year on year in terms of entire R&D expense.

Let me see if there are any other questions on the webcast. Yes, we have a second question from Marc Possa: "Could you talk about your visibility and its change?"

That's question number one. Question number two about the competitive landscape and its change.

About the visibility of the results, my can say my personal opinion, and then maybe I can hand over to Michael to add something. I do not see any substantial change in the visibility, but again, other than what we see is a macroeconomic impact on Ascom, right?

We have as large part of our revenue, we have projects as well as customer support contracts, right? Customer support contracts are long-term contracts, and there we have close to 100% visibility.

Regarding projects, these are also typically mid- to long-term projects, they also you can argue that we have a certain visibility on the revenue, and there, of course, it depends on execution on our side, but also it depends on the speed of execution of the customer. This is in terms of revenue visibility, right?

The visibility on the order side is again much more impacted by tender activity at our customer side and the investment appetite of the enterprise customers. This is a bit from financial perspective how I see it.

I don't know if Michael, you want to add anything.

I interpret visibility means visibility for project wins, revenue, and order entry, that's what I assume. Basically, in 2025, and I think at the end of 2024, beginning of 2025, we have a much more stringent what we call funnel review, where we basically go through all the regions and actually say, hey, what are the projects that you have on the horizon that you see, then which ones are you bidding for, what are our success chances there, what do we need to do from a corporate perspective, from a regional perspective in order to be more successful.

Then we assign probabilities, like you always do when you have a good funnel management, and that gives us then a very good reasonably good visibility in order to see what orders will come in. I think that is a change in the organization also with the focus on the three regions.

This is now more easily deployed into the regions, this funnel review, and I have been participating now for 5-6 months. David had one month of experience, and I think this is a good way for us to become more predictable internally on what will be the order entry.

From a competitive landscape, I would say, and this is a little bit of my observation, I think some of our competitors that have been acquired by larger companies sometimes are not investing as much as we think they should in R&D. That's why I believe by being the innovator, having innovative solutions, I think in the next few years, we have a good competitive position, because some of them are not as innovative going forward.

Yes, thank you.

I would just add one thing. If you look at our competitors, we very often have competitors that are smaller niche players, sometimes they vary from country to country.

Ascom first of all provides a total solution across a particular space, and the advantage of that is, in particular, for example, if you're looking at medical device integration, we're sitting or seeing pass a ton of data because we're connecting to each one of those medical devices. Whereas a niche player may connect in one area or one particular space.

One thing Michael talked about earlier, which is when you talk with customers, is incredibly powerful and something they're looking for, when you see all that data pass for somebody that's sitting in the ICU or someone even that's sitting in an inpatient environment, you can start to predict with some decent level of accuracy a deterioration potential for that patient long before a human or human eyes would be able to predict that. We're sitting on top of that data.

We're sitting on top of the whole of that data. Some of our competition are sitting on parts of that data.

If we can figure out how to grasp that opportunity, I think that's an absolute opportunity for Ascom to see how we turn those that the those data into real insights that you can do something with. You have the same thing in long-term care, huh?

If you're following your residents around with sensor detection technology, that's four nights in a row your mother's stayed in bed half an hour, then an hour longer, then an hour and a half longer, something has changed. That's not something as a human caregiver you would naturally pick up on.

There's lots of, in my opinion, pools of opportunity there where someone who's across the platform like Ascom can play, where some of our niche competitors who only see a piece of the puzzle will struggle to be able to play.

Thank you. We have one more question from the chat from Mark Webb, and it is: "Could you update more on how the enterprise business is going, and break down sales between prisons and other and geography?"

Maybe on the second part, I would like to mention that we do not provide breakdowns within enterprise neither by geography nor by type of customer. We are happy to give an update on the development of the enterprise business.

Here maybe I will hand over to you.

The enterprise business, as you can tell, we basically use a lot of the technologies that we have in acute care and in long-term care and redeploy them. We have a couple of software solutions that then sit on that, for example the prisoner app, and it sounds like we have now twice picked secure establishments, as we call them, as examples for the customer examples, but this is definitely not the majority of our business.

It's blue light services, basically when you have police, when you have fire departments, they want to have secure communication. When you basically lone worker is a big one, when you are an oil platform, and you suddenly want to know the worker doesn't move anymore, or basically the device that he's carrying is in a awkward position that you can send an alarm.

These are the solutions across the board that we are providing there. That is way beyond the secure establishments.

I think we have a really strong point in the DACH region, and we believe that we have the opportunity to be more successful in other countries, regions with enterprise. That's why we started the enterprise initiative, enterprise growth initiative, where we want to aggressively with a lead generation campaign go after new customers in each country with a different focus on a different vertical/industry, but we believe we have opportunities to grow in that segment, and this will be an emphasis in 2026.

Thank you. There are no more questions from the chat.

Final call for the participants in the room. Yes, one more question.

Pierre, UBS. Maybe one question: the OEM has gained some share in the total revenues, and I was wondering what is it behind.

Is it this US bigger order, or yeah, a little bit if you can comment what went better than Ascom group in the OEM part of the business?

Yes, it is true that in '25, we had a somewhat higher share of OEM, but I would not necessarily see this as a trend. One can also argue that '24 was particularly low in terms of OEM.

OEM for us is a relatively stable business, which of course we try to satisfy our customers, but is not one of our main growth drivers, to put it like this. I would say that there is not any trend that can be seen in this.

It just happened to be a year where our long-term OEM customers ordered a bit more than in '24. Also here, we have some visibility, but not really to the last million that they are going to order.

I would say this is what we can say today. Also in terms of visibility, we have long-term contracts.

We know that these contracts will be fulfilled. We're not entirely sure of the exact timing of the orders, but is certainly a business that we are very happy to keep and to continue.

One more question has come from the chat: "If you were to give an educated guess," okay, better than an uneducated, "where will the industry be in five years' time in terms of consolidation?" I suppose this refers to our industry.

Or our customers, right?

Where will the industry be in five years' time? We can guess which industry.

Yeah.

Maybe two answers, one from both perspectives, and then we're sure that we get Mark's question covered. From the healthcare segment, already today you've got roughly 80% of the healthcare establishments in the US that belong to a system of some sort.

When they belong to a system, there's two meanings to that: they can simply belong to a purchasing group, in the US there's three main purchasing groups that centralize buying, or it can be a part of a system, as Michael mentioned, you have Ochsner in the South, you have Kaiser Permanente along the West Coast, you have AdventHealth across a large part of the US, you have Mayo, which has several clinics across the US. It's two steps: one is, if you join a purchasing organization, they're doing it for two reasons: one is to save money at the end of the day, the second one is also to standardize across who they purchase from, because it's easier at the end of the day to do implementations.

When they're part of a complete system, you will actually see them standardizing across solutions, like they will choose Ascom nurse call for all of their systems. The advantage of that is when they've chosen you, or when you're on these purchasing groups list, if they've chosen you, you have free reign.

If you're on a purchasing group list, you have a license to hunt. You still have to go sell, but each health system has an advantage if they buy it from you, and the purchasing group wants you to buy it from them.

In terms of a competitor, and you'll see the same thing, in my opinion, in long-term care in the US, and you already see it, you have chains in Europe already. You have Korian, which is in many European countries.

You have Emeis, which is in several countries, very strong in France, but in several countries.

Bupa.

Bupa, exactly. More of these are coming.

From a competitor perspective, I think it depends on who you look at as the competitor. If you look at it from a big healthcare industrial-type competitor, I think they will do like Michael said: continue to buy, but not sure if they're going to keep up with the investments that will be needed to keep going.

If you look at it from the smaller niche players, there will either be consolidation or they will disappear, because at the end of the day, the more you move towards software, the more you have to be able to invest. If you don't have scale to be able to invest, it becomes very complicated.

Even if you're looking at specific regions, you need a minimum size of your customer base from a profit perspective for you to be able to go direct in that region, otherwise you'll never be able to make the return on investment. I think you will see a consolidate or disappear strategy in some of these smaller niche players as we go forward.

Regarding AI, could AI be an enabler to reduce the implementation time, and in the end increase the addressable market for you, or is it more a threat because some services software solutions are obsolete going forward?

If we don't do AI internally, that would be a threat, because it can absolutely increase your Think about we have a hundreds plus projects per year that we have to manage, and you have to schedule the right resources with the right competency. It's imagining FedEx sitting in a room with 10 people around the table trying to decide on a human level who's going to go here and where over the day.

It's not efficient. If you don't start to use those tools, somebody else will, and they will become much more efficient, much more cost-competitive than you.

That's why I mentioned, for me, those are areas where we will start to look at and focus on in terms of driving our own internal improvements. You talked about deployment.

You can also think about it from a service perspective. Today, someone does a service call, very often you're dependent upon an unstructured knowledge base that the field engineer can quickly go look in: did somebody already call with this particular case, how to or and therefore a certain level of expertise.

You have now agents that listen in to the so AI agents that listen in to the call, they start already building a prompt for you and go out and dig into your database, and actually doesn't matter if it's structured or not structured anymore, and be able to come back with you, "Okay, dear engineer, try this, try this, try this, because this already occurred at certain places." We're already doing some limited, I would say, pilot testing with that type of thing inside the service.

From an external perspective, same opportunity. We have, for example, with our operating room OR suites Digistat product in Italy, they're literally running the operating room and the scheduling using Ascom product.

What happens is the doctors, the surgeons, they come on Wednesday by noon, they have to deliver their desired schedule for the following week. Then a human sits down and looks at the 60 In this case, they have 60 plus operating rooms in one customer, and they schedule and plan individually each of the operating rooms.

Every day there's an emergency, which means every day something changes. You could quite there exist even on the market algorithms that will allow you to do OR planning, to do dynamic updating of that OR planning.

That's things that we need to look at, how we integrate into our portfolio, because that's a real value add for the customer. The operating room is typically the biggest expense, but also revenue generator for a hospital other than potentially cardiology.

If I can optimize my operating room utilization rate, every point additional that I get out of utilization rate of my operating suite is direct P&L impact on the bottom line. There are absolutely opportunities, and I don't think Ascom has to necessarily every time be the creator of those.

There's some that we may want to, because it's so high value add for us, we may want to be the creator. There may be others that we want to partner with.

It's the value of having that vendor-agnostic open platform. Then

we have one more question from the chat, which is: "Are there any patent changes or expirations ahead in terms of your bundle?" The short answer to this question is no, we don't have anything in the horizon to threaten us in terms of patent expirations or changes.

I think with this, we are probably going to conclude: no more questions from the room and no more questions from the chat. If you should have any further questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to me.

You have my contacts also in the press release. Thank you very much for your participation.

Thank you.

Thank you.