Good morning, everyone. It's my pleasure to welcome you all, both here in person at the SIX ConventionPoint in Zurich, and of course also those joining us online to the StarragTornos Group Annual Media and Analyst Conference 2026.

We truly appreciate your time and interest in our company. As we begin, I would like to draw your attention to our vision, which is displayed on the screen.

This vision continues to guide our strategy and our commitment to delivering excellence in our industry. Today, we will present the 2025 financial results and provide insights into key business developments that have shaped our year.

We have structured this conference to ensure clarity and also transparency, allowing you to gain a comprehensive understanding of our performance and future outlook. I'm pleased to introduce to you our two speakers for today: Martin Buyle, the Chief Executive Officer, and Markus Jäger, the Chief Financial Officer.

They will each play a crucial role in presenting different aspects of our performance and strategic direction. As you can see, the agenda outlines our key topics for discussion.

We will conclude today's session with a Q&A where you will have the opportunity to ask questions and engage directly with the leadership team. Without further delay, I now invite Martin Buyle, CEO, to open the conference with his introduction and business review.

Martin, the floor is yours.

Thank you very much. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.

A warm welcome also from my side. Thank you for taking the time this morning and for being with us today.

I want to start my presentation by looking at who the StarragTornos Group is. As a reminder, we consider ourselves the benchmark for high-precision machining solution solutions, be it in the technologies of milling, turning, grinding, or boring.

We have a long history as a company. It dates back until the 1860s.

We have a global footprint, we operate 30 locations worldwide, 11 of them being production sites. Our workforce is 1,800 employees big, and we have a distinct market focus on different industries, which I'm going to illustrate in a minute to you.

As you have seen from the video that you have seen before, we touch almost every aspect of our lives with our machines. Which are the key markets that are important to us and that we are serving?

Who are the customers that we're serving, and what are the applications? I want to start off with the aerospace sector.

Aerospace sector at the moment is mainly and and to a large extent driven by, first of all, the desire for mobility. People want to travel more.

There is an a large increase in commercial aviation, but also at the moment we're talking about a lot of interest, of course, for from the defense industry. Fuel efficiency, sustainability issues remain a constant driver, have been a driver in the past, and they not only have an influence on the world climate, but also on the cost structure and the cost calculation of the airlines.

Typically, customers are military and civil OEMs, jet engine manufacturers, and Tier 1 suppliers to those OEMs. A second very important industry that we are serving is MedTech and Dental.

You can imagine the main drivers there for this industry. We have an aging population, especially in the developed world.

We have an increased demand for miniaturization and also for precision. We have an imminent cost pressure in this industry, which requires more efficient machinery, more automated machinery on an ongoing basis.

We are working together with customers who are mainly active in the field of orthopedic products, of dental implants, and of instrumentation of any kind. A third industry that we are also covering well, which is not doing so well at the moment, unfortunately—I'm going to say a few words on that in a minute—is the luxury goods industry.

Of course, the drivers there are completely different. We have large parts of the world that have an that have an increased income, they can afford more expensive products.

It has also become, latest since COVID, it has become a means to preserve private wealth. We are working together there with high-end luxury watchmaker watchmakers and jewelry brands, and our main applications there are all parts in a watch or jewels that require a very high precision and also a very high surface quality.

Turning the page over to the next three key markets that we are going that we are serving. One of them, of course, is energy.

Energy is a megatrend. I don't need to explain this too much.

We have two main drivers here. Is the switch from fossil energy to alternative sources of energy, and also an an overall growing demand for energy.

Think about AI applications, think about digitalization, it all requires a lot of energy. We are working there mainly for gas or steam turbine manufacturers, they still exist and they are they are having good times at the moment, and also with suppliers for the wind turbine market.

Transportation is another important market to us, and I have to emphasize that we are not primarily talking about the automotive sector here, but anything else that is off-highway. Also think about marine marine transportation, which is more in the focus for for our company here.

As you see in the applications, our company our customers produce drive components for for marine applications, gearboxes, and also engine blocks of of big agricultural machinery, for example. The combustion engine is still the the method to produce energy, and it will also continue to be.

Last but not least is the industrial markets, which is a little bit of a mixed bag between different applications that we serve. Our niche in this industrial market is applications where miniaturization and precision is required.

Of course, also there we have this ongoing need for becoming more efficient, going back to environmental requirements, which is a main driver for us. How are we different as a company from all the competitors around us, and what does it have to do with this market focus that I just explained?

At StarragTornos, we are following a focused niche leadership strategy, which means we try to focus on highly differentiated applications rather than standardized volume markets, because the standardized volume markets require usually economies of scale, which obviously we don't have when we compare ourselves to other big competitors. We are convinced that the multi-brand strategy is the right thing to do, we have 11 brands in our portfolio, each of them having a long history, and each of them consequently also having a law having a good brand equity, a targeted positioning, and also a very loyal customer base.

We don't offer a machine, we offer a manufacturing solution. A manufacturing solution includes a machine, includes the toolings, includes the application technology, the software, and the automation.

Performance is our second name, I would say, and this is also a way how we differentiate our differentiate ourselves from other competitors. In many cases, as I mentioned before, our machines are considered benchmark when it comes to machining power, precision, and productivity.

We have a very strong service base, customer base and installed base that we can that we can work on, increasingly also introducing digital products, which gives us another possibility to extend that business. Last but not least, we're among the only companies in our industry that have European roots and that also have European ownership and a long-term strategy.

This is has become increasingly important in days in these days when defense has become a more important topic and that Asian companies are more and more entering Europe, acquiring businesses here, and so on. This is really something that that sets us apart from from our competition.

What are we doing in order to reinforce this, to reinforce our positioning? We're investing heavily in R&D and continue to do so, about 7% of our turnover is invested in R&D on an annual basis, following the drivers that I have just explained before.

We're still working on fully benefiting from the synergies. We have introduced the measures that were necessary, now as time goes on, we are harvesting them.

We continue to expand in high-growth applications. We want to become, or we are already, depends, we want to become one of the top three players in each of the industries that we serve and each of the of the target applications that we serve.

The after-sales business, as I say, is a very good base layer for our business. We believe we can still grow it by penetrating the installed base further and by coming up with new products like digital products.

As a as the ground layer of all of this, we keep developing our own talent and our own expertise. This is due to the fact that we have increased shortage of skilled labor.

This concerns both our company, but also our customers, and we are increasingly asked to help out our customers on on on jobs that require skilled employees, and that's why we continue to invest in in talents. We have about 100 apprentices in our company at the moment.

What are the key figures of the past year? The CFO, Markus Jäger, will dive into this more deeply just in a minute.

As a few cornerstone figures, we achieved CHF 473 million in order intake last year. We achieved about CHF 442 million in net sales, which ended up in a bottom line, an EBIT of CHF 6 million or an EBIT margin of 1.4%.

The Board of Directors will propose to the Annual Shareholder Meeting a share a dividend per share of CHF 1, and the global workforce I have already mentioned before. Looking at some of the figures a little bit more in detail, order intake figures were relatively constant compared to 2024.

Overall, the signal is good. Overall, the level could be kept.

I'm going into a little more of an analysis of those on on my next few slides. Going to the last to the last line in this table, the order backlog in turn increased slightly, we are still sitting on a good order backlog overall.

There's enough work to do, and I will refer to that as well when we come to order intake. Net sales has decreased since last year by about 10%.

We have several influencing factors there. Some of the factories are not fully loaded while others are fully loaded, and we have received a lot of orders, as you might remember, which we have already also already announced in the in the second part of the year or even in the fourth quarter.

The turning into turnover will be in 2026 and in the consequent years, because some of those projects are large projects and multi-year projects. EBIT, as a consequence of a lower turnover, has come down.

We have countered this reduction by cost-saving measures that we introduced in various plants in the course of last year, following, in general, a very cautious approach and following a very an approach where we can react quickly to to influences that keep being thrown on us, as we have a lot of examples on this in the last few weeks. Net profit was kept at at CHF 5 million.

Markus is going to say something about that later. Now looking into into the order intake a little bit more, and I'm referring now to the industries I have laid out to you just a minute ago.

The most positive sign we have received from aerospace, we have seen a surge of 40% from 2024 to 2025, and you see that aerospace is now more than a third of the overall order intake of the group. MedTech and Dental has seen has seen a decline.

The biggest decline we had to account for was in luxury goods, we have come down to about CHF 29 million in order intake. This is due to the fact that the whole industry is running at a very low pace, and this caused us some issues last year, but it was counterbalanced, as I said before, by by the aerospace standing spending mostly.

Industrial could be kept at a similar level than last year. Transportation and energy going backwards a little bit.

You see the amounts are not as big as if you compare it to the to the large portions of our order intake, and these two industries are heavily influenced by large projects. It depends, can go up and down a little bit more than the rest, because it really depends if there are orders on the market, big projects on the market, and if we get them.

Overall, as I said before, more or less constant order intake, which is the good news. Looking at it from a geographic point of view, which is also something we regularly do, the message is pretty simple: everything went up except for Europe.

Europe came down by about 20% in order intake, the Americas grew, and also Asia grew. Europe, of course, includes Switzerland.

Switzerland includes luxury goods, there is a direct link between a reduction of the luxury goods segment and the European performance overall. Asia, probably a word about Asia, we have seen quite some increase there, coming from a low level in 2024.

I would say it bounced back to a regular level in Asia, something that we could expect. This is an overview—we're switching now over to net sales—this is an overview, a rough overview on how the net sales is composed of.

Most of it, about 1/3 is the service business, a quarter is the service business, and 3/4 is the machine business. Machine business, naturally, hopefully, following my explanations, has suffered more from a downward trend in in net sales than service has done.

Service is a very constant business. I mentioned innovation as being one of our key activities, what has been done last year?

I just pick out two of them. On the left side, you see one of the latest machines that we brought to the market from the Starrag product range.

This is a machine—you don't need to go through all the details—this is a machine that is clearly focused at commercial aviation and titanium manufacturing, because titanium is directly associated with the increased use of carbon-fiber-reinforced material. All of those of you who have been on an A350 or a 7 or a Dreamliner, 787, you have been flying on an airplane that is mostly composed of CFK material, and it also includes a lot of titanium.

We believe the trend is going this way. We have a major order secured for a big European airplane manufacturer, and execution is underway.

The machine is doing fine. It will be the new benchmark in this industry.

On the right side, you see our latest development in the Tornos range. It's the DT 7 and DT 10.

This is based on a modular product platform. It addresses the needs of the customers for compactness and for higher efficiency and productivity.

It also includes digital features like a closed-loop manufacturing option, it means you machine something, it get it gets measured inside the machine, the machine gets adapted based on the measurement, and then you keep machining. It it's a learning machine that improves itself during the course of operation.

We also believe that this is going to be a real feat, and we are we are expecting good results from this machine as well. Just to show you two examples of what we have done last year in this respect.

Of course, sustainability activities have also been performed last year. We have done some, let's say, more technical things like a double materiality analysis based on ESRS.

We try to translate sustainability mostly into our products, because I think that's how we benefit from it as a company and also that's how our customers benefit from it. The X70 Heckert machine, which is displayed here on the right-hand side, is a good example.

It's again a machine that addresses the customer needs. It has a more compact footprint, and due to the drive systems inside, it also consumes less energy than its predecessors.

Finally, a word on the merger synergies. We have implemented most of the measures in 2025.

They have been mostly focused on global procurement, sourcing material together between the former Starrag organization and the former Tornos organization, and we started using our global footprint, our global production footprint, sales and service footprint, our infrastructures. We have started off well in China, in our Taiwanese factories, and we have seen first positive effects in the annual result 2025.

In order to have full-year effects and in order to have the full the full effect, this will flow in gradually into the results of this year and the years to come. Cross-selling opportunities between Starrag and Tornos have been pursued, of course, this year.

Most of those are related to the luxury goods segment somehow. Due to the fact that this has had a low a low performance overall, this this segment, the cross-selling activities have been implemented, but we will see more of an effect of this in the years to come.

Having said that, I'm now going to hand over to the CFO to give you a deeper insight on our financial figures.

Thank you, Martin. Ladies and gentlemen, now I would like to give you a little bit an insight, a deeper insight into the financials.

First, oh, this is the other way side, I have to go here, sorry for that. Not so important.

I would like to start with this slide, and you allow me not from the right to the left, I start with the left side. Why?

It's important for us. We delivered what we promised.

We turned it around in the second half of the year. We gave the market guidance that we will see positive numbers at the end of the day.

Now, CHF 6 million EBIT, is it good? We are not satisfied with it.

Just to set it clear. Why?

We said we are aiming for 8%, and this is 1.4%, and this will be our outmost target. We want to go in this direction, that is very clear.

Now why only, with respect to say this, CHF 6 million? Now I go to your left side.

We merged at the end of 2023, you all know that. Nevertheless, I'm showing you here five years, because it gives a little bit a better picture what have happened.

When we start on the very left side, there 2021 to 2023 are pro forma numbers, 2024, 2025 are equivalent to our financials. You see the order intake.

2023, it's about 590 million—590 million was in 2022, 500 and roughly 30 in 2023. What Mr.

Buyle just explained you, there are market segments, how they develop. Let's just take one out of them, it's luxury goods.

In these 529 million, we had 100 million out of the luxury goods segment, you see the impact. When we go further in 2024, the luxury goods came down from 50—sorry, from 100 to 50 million, and now another 20 million down to 30 million.

We believe now it's bottoming out, but we don't believe that we have a big impact in 2026. We don't see it.

We see it further down the road, maybe 2027. The good thing about it is that we have not lost customers.

Our customers are in the same position than we are. We strongly believe that this valley we are going through will end at the end of 2026, and we see much more to come in 2027.

Just add this 100 million to this 473, that gives you a little bit a picture. We don't believe that it come back immediately in one year, 100 million, but we believe that when the market is coming back, you could imagine where we will go.

Order backlog, despite the fact that, yes, the orders came down, we could keep it on last year's level. Also this is a good sign for us.

Net sales, Mr. Buyle already mentioned it, 10% down.

When we are precise, 10.5%, but it doesn't matter at the end of the day, it's significant, it's 50 million down from one year to the next year. For us, and this is what I want to show you the next slide, this is for us important, and when you look at our business, this is really you have to understand that what we show you here.

That's more or less the same information what you have seen before, just a little bit a different graphic. I like the graphic, because what you see here always the second bar is the order backlog, this 336 million you have seen before.

Look at the other bars before, it's 197 and 276 million. This is order intake in the second half year of 2025, even so the economic conditions are not that good still for us in certain areas.

We could achieve 276 million. Now when you go back, 221 in 2024, 260 in 2023, we have to go back to 2022 to see similar levels.

We see it's really pushing back, it's coming in. Not all our segments, but therefore we have this portfolio test theory that we say, yes, some of our segments, market segments are performing quite well, and when the others are coming too, then you can make your own judgment where it could end up.

Now let's have a look at our P&L. As I mentioned, you can see it, the glass half full, half empty.

As I mentioned before, when we talk about 10.5% sales down, that means 50 million, a little bit more than 50 million. Gross profit margin in the range of 60%, it's easy to calculate.

Just this 50 million, we lost 30 million on gross profit, 30 million. Now compare that with our costs.

We had in 2023, I have to say—four, sorry—about 183 million, and we have other expenses in the range of 76, we have 260 million expenses. We are losing on net on gross profit 30 million.

We would have to reduce our cost basis by about 12% to cover that. It could be possible when we say, okay, we don't believe in our niches where we are, but we believe in it.

What we could do? What have we done?

Let's have a look at the personnel expenses. We could reduce the personnel expenses by CHF 17 million last year.

We had to add 2 million back into it, because we made a restructuring in Chemnitz, in our plant in Germany, in one of the plants in Germany. Because this plant is really build up more or less it served the industry segment, and we said we have to make it profitable, because the industry is coming back.

We do not see 100 million coming in the next years where we had our business set up. We reduced it to a level that we can also assure when we make 70 or 60 million that we are profitable with this plant in the engine business.

I'm not talking about service, that's a different story. I'm talking about engine business, yeah, to make it profitable.

We are still in the position, when the business really comes back, that we can go with the waves. We have make a restructuring out there.

The other thing what we have done is, yes, of course, we want to keep our people. We are at the edge of the technology where we are working with our machines.

We need the people. We need R&D, we need the technicians, we need the assembly guys, because we cannot just take a passing stranger and say, okay, help us to assemble a machine.

It will not work. We have to keep our people.

Therefore, we tried to go wherever it was possible to make short-time work. For example, in Vuadens, luxury goods, this plant is just set up for luxury goods more or less and MedTech.

We also had on top of it in Chemnitz short-time work, but also in Moutier, that means with Tornos. We played the whole card.

More or less short-time work helped us with approximately CHF 4.7 million to reduce our cost bases there. When we are looking forward, we have reduced our total workforce by approximately 167 FTE, full-time equivalents.

Last year, on average, we had 1,880 full-time equivalents in our books. We started this year with 1,814, you see we really reduce this year once again our cost bases.

When we look at the other OpEx, we could reduce them by approximately 10%. We reduced it by when we are precise, roughly 7.9, CHF 7.6 million.

In total, we were in the position to reduce our costs by CHF 22 million. As I mentioned before, the hit from topline was approximately CHF 30 million.

Therefore, our EBIT went down to what you see here, to CHF 6 million. Now between EBIT EBITDA and EBIT, you have another million for additional depreciation, because, last time when we were here a year ago, we just told you that we have finished the new plant in Taiwan for Tornos, we have higher depreciation.

When we look at the financial results, we have been in the position to reduce our finance expenses by approximately to CHF 1 million, sorry. On the other hand, the FX effect was negative for us in the range of CHF 2.8 million in this area.

We have strong exposure to the US dollar as well as to the euro, and you know the Swiss franc quite strengthened, and with that, even so we are doing hedges, we could not cover everything. Last but not least, when you look at our net profit, CHF 5.3 million, where is it coming from?

It's as also we had some positive tax effects. We had quite a intensive tax investigation in our sub-holding in Germany.

We have five organizations there, covering the period 2019 to sorry, 2016 to '19, four years. Even so it took very long to finish it, it was a positive outcome.

You just have to imagine to have a positive tax outcome in Germany, we could achieve that. No adjustment, we could release accruals in the magnitude of CHF 1.6 million.

We had in all our legal entities in Germany this year, of 2025, positive income, we assessing our assets through impairment tests and so on, and therefore we were in the position, we have loss carryforwards, some of them we could make an asset out of them, and therefore we have a positive impact here on the taxes. Going further, let's talk a little bit about the balance sheet.

Last year I said, and I will say it once again also this year, are we satisfied with our net working capital? No.

They say clear, no, it's too high. There's one reason why it's too high, it's just the inventory.

We are still, what you see here up there, CHF 177 million, even so you see that we did quite some good work from 215 down to CHF 177 million, but it's still too high. It's still a legacy out of the years 2021, 2022, where in corona times, '19 started, where we thought we will not be in the position to deliver to our customers the goods they are asking for, because there was quite some tension.

Therefore, at the end of the day, to make it simply, we purchased too much, but we did it by purpose, because we wanted to be in the position to deliver our goods, our machines to the customers. Now we have to reduce it.

When I see next year at the end of the year 20 million less, then I'm happy. Why?

Out of this 177 million, you will see it in the annual report, is approximately 100 million raw material and components, and this 100 million we have to bring down by at least 20 million, then we are on the right spot. On the other hand, you see here receivables going up.

This is mainly driven by our long-term contracts what we have with our customers. The normal term is in this way: we ask the customers as soon as we sign the order to make a down payment in the range of 20%.

Thereafter, we are accumulating revenues, and only when then the customer says, okay, he takes over the machine, next 60% they have to pay, and when we finally hand over the machine to the customer, the next 20%. In between, we accumulate accounts receivable out of PoC, and in this amount of 132 is approximately 70 million out of this portion.

It's going up, will be invoiced to the customers in a later stage. You see the opposite position in the total current liabilities, 164 million, out of that approximately 50 million are prepayments from our customers.

Despite what have we done in addition this year, our investment in CapEx were only about CHF 12 million. In-house production was a little bit increased in Germany.

We finished at Tornos SA the inventory system, smaller things, and we invested CHF 2 million in our systems. Now going forward, next slide, I would call it a nice slide, there you see our cash position, the cash flow.

When we look at it from the free cash flow, last year -CHF 7 million, this year we increased to CHF 35 million. It's quite an achievement.

You see it's coming from operating cash flow, roughly CHF 48 million, we invested CHF 12 million, is CHF 35 million. When you look at the last line here, net cash debt, that means we have CHF 29 million more cash on hand than we have bank debts.

We have been in the position or we did it, at the end of 2025, we had no current borrowings. We paid everything back.

We could clear it. It's quite a good development.

What have we done? This is what I have said, this CHF 36 million is a payback so that we have also for the future the lines available for us, and we paid a dividend of CHF 5.5 million.

From the cash, we have our foundation and we are ready to move if whatever it comes to us. We are very stable here, also going further how we are doing business.

At the end, with that slide, I want to finish my presentation. That's the payout ratio, what you see here, as mentioned, profit, net profit CHF 5.3 million.

We have roughly 5.5 million shares outstanding. The earning per share is 0.98, roughly, Swiss francs.

The Board of Directors, as Mr. Buyle already mentioned, will propose to the shareholders at the AGM that we pay out a dividend of CHF 1.

Let's see if this will turn into reality, most likely yes. With that, I will hand over back to Mr.

Buyle. Oh, very quick, only this, sorry.

That was also my beginning statement. Yes, we want to grow.

We haven't been in the position to do so just because of the market conditions. We want to achieve a EBIT of 8%.

We are sticking to that. We want to achieve that.

Therefore I said 1.4% is not even close to this, with a little bit of tailwind, we should be in the position to do so. Dividend still now this year a little bit over 100%, it's beyond the range we provided to the market.

Thank you.

Thank you, Markus. I'm going to take over, and I want to say a few words on how we look into the year that is already ongoing since three months, 2026.

I want to refer back to the to the industries that I that I mentioned before and that I explained to you before, because those are the most important drivers of our business, and they will determine how the year 2026 will go. We have a certain correlation, of course, with the overall economic activity, and that relates to the first bullet point on this slide.

We don't expect a broad-based recovery. Economic uncertainty is is everywhere.

We have thought the new trade barriers will become the only risk, but now we have found out that there are other influential factors going on, oil prices going up—I think you know much better about that than me. It will those are all external influential factors which bring us to the conviction that we will we'll not see bright blue skies in this year on an overall, on a macroeconomic environment, on an industrial environment.

Having said that, we believe that aerospace and also the defense sector is going to continue investing, not just in 2026, but we believe this is a mid to long-term growth and mid to long-term investment commitment looking at the fact that some of these areas have been neglected over the last 30 years. It takes more than one or two years, more one more than one or two good years to revive what is dearly needed in these days, as we now gradually find out.

We are less optimistic about the recovery of the luxury goods segment this year. We believe, or we are our estimation is that it will remain at the low level, probably leveling out in 2026 with then picking up in 2027 again.

It's still a long way to go, we're just in the beginning of the year and it's too early to say. What we can say for sure, that's it's not going to be an explosion in a positive way in the luxury goods segment.

The other segments, transportation, MedTech, dental, and energy have a higher correlation to the overall economic activity. Transportation also depends a bit on how the spending behavior is going to continue like this.

As you might know, transportation is also one of the industries where we include defense spendings as well. The order backlog, as I said before, has been kept at a at a at a good level, which secures good capacity utilization in some of the plants that we have.

We're running at full steam in in many of the many of the plants. On the other hand, we have not enough work to do in other plants, it's a little bit of a mixed picture.

We believe this is going to remain this way. By the way, what has not been mentioned yet is that, of course, we also try to use the resources mutually and unload the the factories that have a lot of capacity utilization with the ones that don't have so much, we help each other out in very simple terms.

We're going to do that, of course, in 2026, because we don't want to let opportunities pass by, as we believe this is a a unique opportunity that is opening us for our opening up for our company in the next few years. Really it a lot depends on that we carry through the projects that we have on hand on a very good pace, and hopefully we get some revival from the general economy.

I would say a precondition for this has to be that this general the general chaos that is going on at the moment needs to calm down to a certain level so people can start making their their investment calculations and they're they have the the the the perspective to invest again. We remain cautious with what we do.

We are prepared for everything. We're also prepared to scale down or scale up, because luxury goods segment, Swiss watchmaking, has often been called dead.

We believe it's as dead as always, means it's bouncing back and it will bounce back at some point, and you also have to be prepared for that point in time, because there you have an opportunity to deliver material. I was asked about outlook 2026, what does it mean in financial terms?

Summing all this up, what I said now, I think the best way to put it is that I am looking into a year 2026 that is about the same magnitude as 2025. It's way too early to say it's going one way or the other.

We have too many moving parts on the table, and some of the dynamics in the background are similar to the ones we have seen in 2025. Hopefully we will get surprised in a positive way, but it's too early to judge.

Unfortunately, in the last few months, we always have been surprised in negative ways, I'm I'm very cautious and not being not don't want to be considered pessimistic here. Good.

I'm finished with my presentation. I hand it back over to you, Rolph.

Thank you, sir. We have now reached the Q&A section of our conference.

We will first start to take questions here in the room. As we have also quite a number of people following this conference online, and we will give those people the opportunity to raise questions after we have been through the room here.

Please feel free to participate. Who would like to start, and I will come to you with the microphone so that the people online are also able to hear your question and, of course, also the answer.

Okay.

Fehrenbach, AWP. Did I understand you correctly, excuse me, that the assumption for the current year of probably stable was in connection to sales, maybe?

You said I understand it's difficult to predict, to make a clear guidance, but do you see a chance to keep sales stable or even maybe slight increase? Regarding a second question, if you allow, the margin, you said you expect positive effects of different measures you've taken.

You're with 1.4% pretty low. Do you see any improvement potential for this year?

Thank you.

The first part, when I talk about expectations, I always talk about bottom line. Topline is there to serve the bottom line.

To be honest with you, it's very difficult to give anything more precise at this point, because we have too many influential factors going out there. My statement was related to the EBIT.

Concerning your second question, what can we do in terms of improving it, I think we have initiated quite some measures last year, which are going to show their full-year effect this year. As I said, we are prepared to take further measures if needed.

We also think that we can benefit fully from the synergies that we have initiated. First priority here is the global procurement initiative, or a common procurement initiative, which of course goes better if we have more volume, so that has indeed a correlation with the net sales figures that we are talking about.

This is basically the improvement potential that we see, but we must not forget that the biggest leverage on the topline is never a cost-saving measure, but is an improvement in sales. We will serve our P&L best if we can make sure that the orders on hand are processed swiftly and according to what we have sold.

If there are some external influences that serve us, this is nice, but the main topic is benefiting from the initiatives we have already started, if necessary start new ones, and make sure we process the orders as planned.

Someone else?

Marina Hofstetter from Schweizer Maschinenmarkt, mostly the French-speaking part of it. I have two questions.

The first one would be what is driving your clients' investments? You talked about the European roots and the European ownership of the company that has a big impact, I guess, in the defense industry.

Do you see also a positive impact in other segments? Besides the performance of the machine, what do clients expect?

More service—you say service is something quite stable—or more automation, more complete solutions? The second question would be concerning the French-speaking part of Switzerland production sites.

You talked about short-time work for 2025. How does 2026 look like?

The first question, I try to be short, because I could say a lot about that. What drives the investments of our clients, it's very different, because we are working in so many different areas.

Of course, defense spendings at the moment are driven by the demand to defend or to build up, let's say, a credible wall of defense. We're not talking about attack investments here, we're talking about defensive investments mainly.

If you look at aerospace, the main driver is the increased mobility of people. We have, imagine Airbus has 8,000 airplanes on order, an order backlog of 8,000 airplanes, it's incredible.

This is certainly a need. I would say in general, we come to the table when the need of the customer is about gaining efficiency, having a high level of precision, and having a high level of reliability.

People are looking for good service support. I think that's very important.

Very often it's the decisive factor for customers to choose for us, because they know they can rely on a good service organization. At the same time, automation is one of the key elements, one of the key drivers for investment, because it's simply the fact that you don't find people anymore.

Not skilled, not unskilled, and out of the ones you find, the skilled portion is even lower. This is a worldwide phenomenon for some reason, which I did not fully understand, but when I travel to customers, I see it everywhere, not just in Europe.

How can we tackle this? We can tackle this by integrating the machines more into manufacturing systems, I call this digitalization, and also increase the level of automation, which we very often sell together with the machine.

Can you repeat your second question?

The second question was [unclear].

Yes, the production sites in the French-speaking part, they are both, of course, very focused on let's say the industries that are not going so well at the moment. We're still working with short-time in both of those factories.

The factory in Vuadens we use as a spillover factory for production that we cannot handle in the plants that are fully loaded, we can gain some synergies there. Moutier, we are also applying the short-time work and, of course, doing our best to improve the situation as much as we can.

Those two factories, of course, are mostly affected by the downturn in the luxury goods segment.

Good morning or lunch. Tobias Klöpper from ZKB.

You already touched briefly on this considering you have a pretty large footprint and concentrated orders in aerospace and defense, how can you even further efficiently use your footprint? Can you shift more production you just mentioned to French-speaking part of Switzerland?

Or maybe a few words on this?

The first priority, of course, is always to use the footprint for the intended purpose. If that is not possible, if the markets are down or so, we have increased possibilities now by the merger with Tornos to use mutually the factories that we have.

Of course, we can always only distribute the workload that we have, but we are doing this now already at a quite professional level. We're also including even the Taiwanese factories for pre-assemblies.

I think it's a little bit opportunistic, because it really depends on how the utilization is there and what is needed. I think what we have shown ourselves after the merger is that we work together in a more closed form, and we are much quicker to exchange capacity utilization if needed now.

This is something that we have not been very used to in the past, but it worked out quite well. Without that, to be honest, we wouldn't be able to manage all the orders that we have on hand in the segments that I explained.

I'm

Andreas Meier, Finanz und Wirtschaft. Why aren't you doing better in energy?

Because last week we heard at Accelleron that the order backlog at the power generation companies are very high. You have to wait five years for a turbine delivery, and also power transmission have old books full of orders, also because of this high demand of energy for all these data centers.

Why aren't you affected from that boom in power generation?

It's a very it's a very valid question and a and a good question. I explained a little bit before, energy to us means mostly gas and steam turbine manufacturers, which would qualify for Accelleron, and also wind wind energy.

We are always looking at these figures in relative terms, how do we compare it to the year before? I would say the years 2023, 2022 to 2024 were heavily influenced by a lot of investments in the Chinese wind turbine market, because according to the five-year plan, China installed 9,000 wind turbines a year.

Investing 9,000, 9,000, 9,000, and China is overinvested in wind turbine energy at the moment. The orders from China went down, which pushed us up in the years before, this is this is now missing.

It will pick up again once the next five-year plan takes place, because there is an increase again, an increase in in electric power from wind turbines planned. It has been substituted to a certain degree by the let's say the the traditional way of creating energy, mostly we have seen a lot of inflow from from orders in the gas and steam turbine field.

The energy sector to us in general is very much attached to very particular projects. If we get two of these, we will see an increase of 20%, and if we don't get them, it's more or less flat.

It's energy is a is the sum of a few big projects usually. Due to the the influence that I that I explained, it came down a little bit because this Chinese wind power boom has has come to a plateau.

It will increase, I would say, maybe 2027 again, and it has not been fully replaced by the investments in fossil energy. What is actually going on at the moment, and Accelleron is probably a beneficiary of it, probably not, is investments in nuclear energy as well, and in new technology that's called small nuclear reactors or small modular reactors, it's not we're not talking about entire nuclear plants, we're talking about decentralized power generation.

I believe this is going to be a trend that supports us in the next year next years, not just 2026. Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Anyone else in the room here?

Marc Possa, VDI-G. Just an understanding question concerning your footprint and the load factor differences amongst these 11 production sites.

Maybe the first question: how can you really shift labor from one to the other site? You correctly said they're dedicated, they're purpose driven, it's probably even though they're mechanically skilled, difficult to just translocate them.

Then the other question is: where do we see the maximum and minimum loads amongst these 11 sites, because the average is misleading? How can you adapt the footprint, the structural footprint accordingly depending on recovery of certain sectors or not?

The To break-even points, basically.

Yeah. The cross-utilization, you mentioned right, the cross-utilization is dependent mostly on the skill level of people.

We are often asked by customers, "Why can you not produce more, because you have so and so many people?" The problem is, it's always bottleneck capacities that decide how much you can produce.

You can read it in the textbook, but you can also see it in reality. When we shift production to other production sites, it's usually because we have a similar skill set there.

For example, we have machines that are produced in Rorschacherberg, they are very similar technically speaking to machines that are produced in Vuadens. We find a workforce there that is capable of doing it with a minimum amount of training.

What we try not to do is to shift workforce from one place to the other, because it's usually expensive. If you shift it cross-border, you have a problem with immigration and the Aufenthaltsrecht and so on.

You end up in administrative issues. What we found out is it's better to put the value creation in its entirety into other plants.

Therefore, it doesn't work that we put a Bumotec machine into the Droop+Rein factory where they produce huge machines, because the basic skill set is always there, but the specialized skill set, we need to look for other places. It's not fully replaceable, one and the other.

Concerning capacity utilization, in some plants, we're running at 110, 120%, it's really beyond the top. We could do more, and we do more, but that is then outsourced to other factories.

If you look at let's say the lowest capacity utilization, I would say somewhere between 50 and 60%, which is okay, which is not durable on a long-term basis, but we do not expect it to be a long-term effect, because the industries that we are in, all of them have a driver behind that secures that it will come up again. As I said, the Swiss luxury watch market has been called dead many times, even though I know that with my age, and it has never been true.

We truly believe that the fundamental drivers behind that will come back. It's just Swiss watchmaking industries is a matter of overinvestment in the last few years, which we are seeing let's say the compensation effect at the moment.

No further questions in the room? Then I would like to hand over to the people online.

Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. My first question is a follow-up on the gas turbine and in the energy division and market.

I understand that gas turbine manufacturer order now to secure the product, but they would prefer to be delivered in few years. Do you expect your order to convert into sales not in 2026, but in 2027, 2028 for the energy division?

I cannot answer that question in very general terms. It depends on what we are talking about.

We have orders on hands that have a throughput time of, I would say, 12 to 16 months. Out of the big projects that I mentioned before, probably most of those projects have a longer throughput time.

Really depending on when we get the order, depending on when the PoC turnover is going to take place, What I can say, it's over a longer period of time, but I cannot say it will hit us in 2026 or not, because we have a constant flow of projects, obviously. It will not, like it is almost with every product, it doesn't turn into turnover immediately.

That's why we have, for most of our plants, we have applied the PoC method.

Thank you. And

Go ahead. A

second question, if I may. You have mentioned that a part of the lower margin is due to the mix effect with a higher proportion of low-margin projects.

Is it a structural change or should we expect the opposite impact next year or in the next few years? Maybe it's related to the end market.

Could you give us more color on margin by end market?

I would say, I try to summarize this briefly. The reduction in the margin that we have seen is to a large extent attributable also to the decline in luxury goods that we have seen, because margins are good in the luxury goods.

A lot of it directly correlates with it. Having the same topline does not mean we have the same bottom line in our group.

It's very much an effect of what kind of products that we sell. We are, of course, dependent on the well-being of the luxury goods segment.

We also have decent margins in the aerospace segment. Where the more competition is, like in industry, margins tend to be worse, but even I cannot say this in generality, because it really depends again on the projects that we have.

Because as I said during my presentations, we are not competing in the mainstream. Mainstream is not the place where we are and where we should be, because it's all about price, and the price war we usually don't win.

We win if precision is needed, if performance is needed, and if efficiency is needed. To answer your question, the bouncing back of luxury goods will definitely help us a lot, but it's not the only leverage that we have.

I repeat myself, for us it's important that we can work through the order backlog that we have in a proper way. If we have one or two factors that will help us this year, I'm sure we're going to see a good performance.

Thank you. Any further questions from our online audience?

Okay. Thank you.

Then we have now reached the end of the conference. I would like on behalf of all of us Sorry.

Oh, you have a question. Okay.

Please go ahead.

Thank you. Thomas Bögli, SZVG.

You said that the first effect you saw at the end of 2025. Can you quantified how much it is, and what do you expect from the synergy program in '26?

We have had several initiatives on the synergy program. As I said, the most important one was the procurement synergies.

We calculate those between CHF 5 and 10 million as synergies in procurement. Of course, Markus has elaborated on the stock levels that we have.

It takes a certain while until it trickles down into the P&L. That's why it's very difficult to derive the synergy program effect on the P&L directly, because it has a certain time lag.

What we could achieve in terms of using commonly or mutually the infrastructure that we are using is probably I would estimate in the area of CHF 2 to 5 million, I would add on that. Overall, we're talking about maybe an influence of somewhere below CHF 10 million, CHF 10 million below CHF 10 million.

As I said, you won't find this one-to-one in the P&L, as the most important effect of this, which is the procurement effect, will take a certain while until it works itself through the stock levels that we have, that are, as I said or as has been said before, too high. Does that answer your question, more or less?

Okay. Then we have reached the end of the conference.

We would like to sincerely thank all of you, both here in the room and those who are joining us online, for your time and engagement today. For those attending us in person here at the SIX ConventionPoint in Zurich, I warmly invite you to join us for an apéro in the foyer.

To our online participants, thank you once again for your interest. If you have any further questions, we are of course available at any time.

Wishing you all a pleasant rest of the day and a successful week. Thank you.