Hello everyone, good afternoon. Ines and I are warmly welcoming you to our Q1 reporting, and it's kind of a stellar reporting, but before we start, I have to hint you on our disclaimer that all the statements that we are making during this call are based on information we have at this time.

There are forward-looking statements that are by nature subject to significant knowns and unknown risks and uncertainties. Let's start.

We start, as usual, with an executive summary. I will, after that, hand over to Ines.

She will do a deeper dive into our financials, our share development, and also the outlook that I will present at the end of the presentation, and then we have also enough time for a hopefully lively Q&A session at the end of the call. Let's start with our executive summary and with the market environment.

It's worth to mention really that we are seeing a broader market recovery in many vertical markets. We see manufacturing PMIs increasing, and they are in the major economies above 50, and we see a positive trend.

The German industry for vision components grew in bookings by 20% and in billings by 9% in the first quarter, which is definitely a stronger growth than what was expected from the participants in this industry. We ourselves see, as we have also high exposure to the Asian markets, especially a very strong development in semi-con, consumer electronics, logistics, and data center hardware production.

We also see obviously high competition intensity, especially in China and Asia, and we see also the US tariff situation still unstable and also the geopolitical frictions rising. Far, we see there was no impact on the vision industry, especially of the Iran war so far, but we will remain cautious for the second half of the year.

On the FX side, the situation in Q1 was more pleasant than last year, especially the dollar and also the Chinese RMB were a bit better on our side or were stronger against the euro. However, we still saw Korean won and Japanese yen pretty weak and further devaluating against the euro.

We see a new phenomenon due to the strong demand, we also see starting bottlenecks in the supply chain. Lead times become longer for many components, and some of the components are short and already under allocation.

How do we do in this market? Basically, we are tripling what the German industry is showing, bookings 64% plus, billings 30% plus.

We clearly outperformed the industry with a very strong momentum, and this momentum has accelerated in Q1, and you have seen that we have a positive book-to-bill ratio. The highest growth area remains China, but we also see a more broader growth and also strong business momentum when we look at the order entries in all areas actually.

Some financial highlights, but Ines will give you more insights. Gross profit margin significant improvement to 51.5%.

Our EBIT almost tripled, €17.6 million, which equals a 22.7% EBIT margin. The cash flow, seasonal-wise is always a bit weaker, and especially in the light of the strong growth and growing accounts receivables at 4.8 million.

With regard to the organization, we steer the company as projected. We more or less keep the organization stable.

We here and there add some expertise, but in general, you can expect from us, and this is also what you can see in Q1, we more or less keep the organization stable. Also, the split is more or less stable.

Compared to Q1 '25, there are some increase here in admin and decrease in sales, marketing. This is mainly due to regrouping people in our sales organizations when they are working on the admin side.

What does it mean for the R&D quota? Actually, it's going down to by and large 10%, but it's going down because the revenue is so strong.

This means we are further also investing. We're investing roughly 30 million also this year in new products, in new technologies.

Q1 is not the let's say the most prominent quarter for new product introductions, but we have introduced couple of new innovations and products. On the GTC recently, we have shown our Basler vision simulator.

This is an Omniverse simulator of our products in order to enable our customers to save time when they are in the design phase and try to find the right collection of components to solve their problems. Also, on the other shows, LogiMAT, in Stuttgart, and also the vision show in China, in Shanghai, we demonstrated our new product systems, a TDI line scan system, Stereo Mini, and also a GMSL vision system or product system approach.

With these innovations, we clearly move further on our strategic journey from a single-component company to a more product-system-oriented company acting in different vertical markets. We are also here making strong progress besides of the good results that we are demonstrating.

This brings us to the financials. Ines, please take over.

Thanks, Hardy. I'm pretty glad guiding you through the financials today.

This even makes finance smile a bit. Yeah.

Reading through the lines here, this is our distribution that we usually show, and reading through the lines, you can see that EMEA and Asia held basically their share from last, yeah, from from the last quarter's distribution. That basically means that EMEA and Asia are growing with our average.

You've seen the the billings 30% up. This is the story behind EMEA and Asia.

You see also a shift between Americas and China. As Hardy already said, China was our strong growth region, and Americas, we had a slight decrease in the revenues in compared to prior year.

There's the "but", order entry looks a bit different, yeah? We are also there in Americas and China really on the on the uptick, no?

Here, this is where the distribution comes from, and we are expecting a little bit of a leverage out in next quarter when we turn the orders. This is basically the picture.

I can remember when I was here one year ago, we guided you through, right? I said like don't expect the same picture in Q2.

I'm maybe repeating my story, but from a different different angle, yeah? What we've seen last year is that we came with a with a good order backlog from Q4, yeah?

We had a larger revenue than we had the order backlog, this was also the story this year. When you take a look at Q4 2025, we carried over around 9 million to Q1, and we turned we turned it around, but also, especially in the last days of the quarter, we got a good order intake, and here you can see even a higher order intake than the revenues, yeah, coming in and helping us, of course, with Q2, yeah?

We see a bit little bit of a trend that the orders last us longer, yeah, not not by a big influence, but we also expect a good turn in Q2, but not exactly what we are seeing in Q1 here. That was really a very good quarter for us.

Coming through the gross profit and the gross profit margin. Top line is good, bottom line is better, and it starts with gross margin.

Here you see really the uplift from 28.2 in Q1 last year to now €39 million, and this is €11.6 million that we just gained out of gross profit, and really nearly passed through to our EBIT. Where does that come from?

We say that the 8 to 9 million is really coming from a from volume effect. Then we have about 1 to 2 million is really leverage, right?

We did you see our or you saw our employee number not rising, we have had a good leverage also of our ops employees here, this helped us. We had also a little bit of an uplift in the in from the revenue structure from FX-rate impact, yeah?

It didn't get worse, it got a little bit better, no? This is where we had really the impact here.

It's basically the same picture in the EBIT because we made it work to pass from the 11.6 million nearly everything through. We have €11.3 million more in our EBIT despite inflation, yeah, going on, etc., but we nearly have it.

That means we were we were losing a bit in the OPEX, but we wanted to hint through also that we are investing currently in automation and efficiency project, so that's in the OPEX, and will also be in the OPEX at least for this year, also basically next year, and that we have selective hiring ongoing wherever wherever required, yeah, so that we don't further decrease our FTEs, but really have, yeah, the positions wherever we really need them to generate the top line and our bottom line. This a good overview.

I think, again, hinting maybe to our EBIT margin, yeah, the revenue of 70.7, which is the 30% above what we had, and now the EBIT margin of 22.7%, yeah, 12.2 points up, also very good net income and the earnings per share, of course, up, and also a good EBITDA, yeah? I just calculated it's above 27%, which is also which is also very in a range that we that we would like to see.

Going through the cash flow, we have added to our, yeah, to our KPI overview here the indicators for days in payables, receivables, and inventory. Here's something to add maybe, our days in for the working capital, our days in inventories are down to 82 to 82 days from nearly 100 days, right?

This is now a direction, yeah, where we don't want to have it lower, to be honest, but we decreased the we decreased the the days here. We also had a little bit of an, yeah, of a of a decrease in the days of receivables, we came from a 59 days and now have 57 days.

You see, of course, the majority coming from the OCF, yeah, from our operative result, and a nearly steady ICF, which includes, by the way, our acquisition in AlphaTheta and the, yeah, the the share price here that we had, and a very good free cash flow also for a first quarter where we usually have the outflows of the €4.8 million. This is the overview we talked you through, yeah?

Maybe here to hint our our net debts, we were able to increase to decrease the Pardon. They have the net debt down to €30.9 million.

We are paying down our liability to banks, right, while still keeping the cash steady in comparison to last to the quarter of last year, no? Overall, I think also from the balance sheet, good overview.

This takes us to the share. Here, no no no real news here, same story every time, which is not bad news, but no real real turn here.

This is pretty good news. We had the opening price 15.32 on January 2nd, and we closed on May 6th €23, which is, yeah, which is pretty much of an uplift, really right direction, I would say, and gives us, of course, hope to reflect our picture.

With this one, now we are starting to the outlook.

Okay. Let's start with the outlook.

Thank you, Ines. First with the assumptions.

What do we expect for the remainder of the year? After the numbers we are seeing and the macro trends, we expect the computer vision market to grow at least in a high single digit in 2026.

For the first half year, most likely it will be in double-digit growth. We also believe and assume that there will be a broader industry recovery, and the leading growth, however, comes from semi-con, consumer electronics, data center hardware, and logistics applications.

Definitely, we have to face that the trade and geopolitical conflicts will most likely rise. This is also concerning us, even though we see no direct impact at the moment, where the second half of the year becomes, yeah, pretty difficult and hardly to predict in the light of all these conflicts.

As we have a relatively short view of only order books at hand for about two months, we can only, yeah, well project the second quarter, but the third and fourth quarter is hardly to predict at the moment. We assume also currency volatility will happening, up and downs, especially Korean won, Japanese yen, they are weak already, but we also need to keep an eye on US dollar and on the RMB, obviously.

We also believe the supply chains over the course of the year will further tighten if the market stays that strong. It will definitely be challenging, and here and there, we also will see bottlenecks that might constrain a certain revenue contribution in a certain quarter.

We also believe the competitive intensity will stay high, especially in the Asian region. Under these assumptions, two days ago, we increased our former guidance, and the former guidance was given out shortly after the conflict started, we were pretty cautious, and then we had a good March, we had also a good April, this is why we are confident to increase our revenue guidance from formerly €232 million to €252 57 million formerly, and now we increase it of €247 to €270 million.

This also means, as we keep the organization size more or less stable making this happen, this would mean on the EBIT margin side also an increase from 6.5% to 10% percent points EBIT margin before, now to 9.5% up to 13%. This significant step, we feel confident to get there, and this would also bring us a much closer step obviously to our midterm guidance, where we projected 1 and 1/2 years ago to realize roughly €275 million and at least 13% EBIT margin by 2028.

Let's see how this year will go. We will concentrate first of all on this year, but we are well on track obviously to our midterm guidance.

You have seen the China exposure, this midterm guidance is given in the light that the China market will stay open to us, but the recovery that we were anticipating in this midterm guidance is starting to happen now in 2026. With this outlook, we come to the end of the presentation, and we are very happy to enter our Q&A session, and our operator and colleague Jan will give some information how to do it.

Hello, good afternoon.

Good afternoon, Lasse.

I have a few questions. The first one is one of the markets you mentioned that's doing better is consumer electronics.

Could you shed some I understand the whole semicon and AI hardware business, I think the trends are clear, but in consumer electronics, what is driving the better growth there? Is this sort of customers upgrading some of the production infrastructure that they built three or four years ago and haven't touched since COVID, or is there anything else that's going on there, changing form factors in devices or anything else?

Maybe we take them one by one. Maybe that's easier.

Okay. Okay.

Makes it easier for me. The consumer electronics sector is mainly driven by what we are seeing about two factors.

One factor is new devices, but this is not only new phones, but it's also about new devices in earbuds, for example, or other wearables. The other topic that we are seeing is that after the backlash in COVID, we come now into a situation when more peoples start to buy into these consumer electronic goods again, and the demand is rising.

This is what you can see in the annual reports of the consumer electronic companies, and this is causing some further investments in capacity and also causing willingness to invest also in new devices and production capacity of new devices.

Understood. Then the second question, you referenced supply chains a few times.

Can you explain sort of which components specifically you're starting to see shortages or tightness in? This question to some extent relates to the outlook as well, because when we now look at the outlook, assuming you have good conversion of order intake in Q1 into revenues in the second quarter, which you do typically have, it does mean you're still guiding for quite a bit of a revenue and margin slowdown in the second half.

Is that largely related to the supply chain or is there anything else going on?

Yeah. With regard to the materials that are short or the situation in the supply market, in most of the cases at the moment, we only see longer lead times on the supply chain, and also our lead times increase a bit towards the customer, this is why also customers start to enter their orders a bit earlier, and we have also to order a bit earlier the material.

However, there are also some short materials. There is obviously the memory market.

It's in the press all over, and we also see shortages on PCBs at the moment because the PCB manufacturers are also, yeah, trying to allocate their capacity where the big business is, and this is AI at the moment, AI-related hardware. Last but not least, we also see specifically for the vision market, also as the demand is pretty good, shortages on the image sensor side.

All together, it means for us much more intense management on the supply side. We are in a premium position, especially when it comes to specialized material for vision products, that we have a leading position and that we are on top list of the suppliers, but it's definitely a situation with such a growth that we are demonstrating here where we come to the limits of what is easily realized.

This also brings us to the margin topic. Maybe, Ines, you can add later some comments as well, but connected to the materials, we definitely at the moment at least anticipate a bit of higher input prices due to these shortages that we are seeing, and also our, let's say, progress of improving gross profit margins by renegotiating materials, it's also not the easiest time at the moment to get back to our suppliers and have a strong negotiation level, yeah.

This is one point from the margin, and maybe you have some more, Ines.

Yeah. You've seen our gross margin now being at 51.5%, right?

We forecasted or we did a scenario where it's easily possible to be even at a 46% or even a little bit lower, yeah? Depending on the input prices, also depending on lower volume that we are seeing, yeah?

You have quite already from the gross margin a big lever. Of course, we could also try to hold with OPEX investments against that, but it's definitely possible when the top line slows down that we also have another hit from the gross margin.

You see, I would say, a cautious or a more cautious approach to H2, yeah? We, of course, looking forward to manage through all of the expectations that we are internally having and combining it with, yeah, the challenges that we see.

Understood. Then final question, I guess going on from what you're saying about H2, how has, I guess, the momentum been coming out of the first quarter?

Is this sort of a one big order intake quarter and then you expect it to kind of soften through the year? I know your visibility is somewhat limited, but just to give a feeling of, yeah, one big quarter and then we kind of normalize, or do you think this is a sustained kind of cyclical upswing?

Because I guess generally PMIs are okay, but they're still not fantastic. If those do come back, you should see a broader recovery.

Just trying to get a feeling of your view on that.

Yeah. Lasse, what we have seen is definitely, if we look at the different months of the first four months of the year, we see definitely kind of an acceleration trend throughout these first four months.

We had pretty good order entries in March and also in April. This means for us that we definitely under the assumption that this is a broader trend.

However, to this extent at the moment, I think it's also start to heat up a bit because there are rumors of supply chain constraints. Our lead times are increasing at the moment, customers buy a bit earlier.

There are a certain, let's say, amount of extraordinary bookings inside. In general, we believe that the trend can continue, depending a bit on the Iran situation and the follow-up effects, but the markets itself seem to be strong.

Yeah. Great.

Thanks very much.

Yes, good afternoon. Just following up on the last discussion, would you say that given the current positive trends early in Q2 that another quarter with more than 80 million in orders might be possible, or would you say that there was a cumulation of several positive effects that led to this high figure in the first quarter, so that this appears to be very unlikely?

I think another quarter to this extent is possible, but not likely.

Yeah. Okay.

Then on the gross margin, you laid out that several scenarios exist, but at the current point in time, one has confirmed, and we have seen the strong first-quarter margin, would you confirm more or less that full-year gross margins are more or less expected at the level of 2025, or any deviation from that forecast already visible?

You mean on 2025, or the first quarter '26?

The full year '26 versus '25. I think in the last call, you more or less said that gross margins should largely remain flat year-over-year.

Can you answer? Or I can start.

Yeah.

That also unfortunately depends on H2, right? Currently we're trending better.

We had a good expectation for Q1, but we are a little bit better than also our internal expectation. Then again, yeah, so that depends a little bit on the mix that we are having.

We had a very good order intake from Americas. When that's turning, that's usually helping just from the mix with the gross margin.

Really it depends on H2, yeah? If the volumes are down for supply chain or market reasons, so that doesn't help because then we can't leverage anymore.

If we have pressure from input prices, that doesn't help. I would still say the expectation holds, yeah?

I currently can't say that I would expect it way better than we had it forecasted by the end of 2025.

Malte, you need to consider that we had a high turnover from China, and the RMB was much better than what we expected. The RMB was stronger against the euro.

Also due to the high revenue, we had significant degression of our fixed costs in operations. Those two effects helped us a lot also to significantly improve, and the one effect is depending on the revenue size, and the other effect is not really in our hands with the RMB situation.

We have one quarter that was much stronger than what we expected, it gives us a good chance to improve the gross margin this year compared to last year, definitely.

Yeah. Understood.

Now, is there one segment in the market that runs below expectations? Everything seems to be great, but is there something that is a bit weaker than this

year? Not on the vertical side.

From the market trends, we are seeing definitely that the German market is below other regions. It's obvious, it's because of the weak automotive and also automation industry.

Fortunately, we have in Europe quite some business also outside Germany, and within Germany, our business is not so high exposed to automotive. This helps us that this, yeah, this headwind that other companies see much stronger that you can't see it so much in our numbers.

Yeah. Okay.

Then on OPEX, we remained pretty stable in comparison to the quarters we have seen last year at around €22 million in Q1. What's your expectation when you're adding some costs obviously here and there to cater for the higher growth for the next few quarters, progression for the year?

We expect selective hires, as Ines mentioned, and we also, and this is considered in our guidance, depending on where we are in this guidance, we also will have higher variable incomes. This will increase OPEX, and this is considered in our guidance already.

As well as the investments for the automation project, right? You've seen from all the quarters we expect or we had in Q1 the lowest share of OPEX from the automation projects going on.

Of course, if we would see the market cool down, there's always a way to stop something or to delay, but there will also be some increased kind of OPEX in the next quarters coming, yeah? Overall, it's not that we're jumping majorly, I would call it, but of course we have to take care of the variable salaries that we have in there.

Yeah. Okay.

Many thanks.

Thank you, Malte.

Bruno, maybe you need to help me. You mean our new products, or in consumer electronics products?

In consumer electronics, yeah. In consumer electronics, let's say, as I mentioned earlier, we see an increase offering from the consumer electronics companies in accessories, wearables around the smart devices, and we also see that production capacity for those devices are increased.

We also believe that new devices on the mobile side are in test state, but it's very secretive, we have no insights, but we just see more and more projects kicking in. On the demand for our products, what we are mainly seeing, in this market, we sell mostly mainstream products, and in this mainstream products, there is a combination with Sony sensors with pretty high sensitivity and also the 5-gigabit Ethernet connectivity.

These products are already launched or we have launched them two years ago, and the customer have started testing and building up systems, and now these systems are deployed, and this is why the revenue is ramping up.

2026 we have in the presentation, 9.5% to 13%. This is for 2026.

After, so far we stay with 13% like our midterm guidance, and we will see over the course of this year what we will do with our midterm guidance and keep you posted, but this will be at the end of this year or beginning of next year, not now actually. We definitely don't want to go below 13%.

We want to keep 13% or increase, but to what level, we need to see this is kind of the balance of our growth investments compared to profitability.

Sorry, could I ask one follow-up?

Yes, sure.

This is Lasse from Berenberg. Sorry, one final question.

Do you think, are we already at this stage of sort of overordering? You mentioned that there's maybe some extraordinary order intake.

I'm just thinking back to the last sort of upcycle where we ended up with a lot of overordering and the whole supply chain became, yeah, bloated, if you will. Do you think, is it too early for that, it's obviously hard to say, but generally your feeling on whether order is genuine or not?

I think with regard to the Q1 publications, I think there are very, very limited overordering if not even none in it. However, starting from April, we believe we are seeing overordering, yeah, because there are some unusual patterns in the order behavior of certain customers.

That we believe now with entering Q2, we are starting to see this phenomena, and we definitely need to keep you posted when we report second quarter to what extent we believe there are those kind of overorderings or exaggerations inside. Q1, more or less fine, yeah, most of control.

Yeah. Then just on the supply chain side, I guess having learned from the past, how do you deal with that differently, I guess, than you did?

Are you accepting that you might lose some orders because your lead times are longer because you don't want to overorder from your own suppliers, or how do you deal with that potential overordering?

Yeah. It all starts with challenging the demand of the customer and flattening out in case we believe it's kind of overordering or pulling in to an extent where in some cases we might even need to get kind of prepayment to know whether it's serious or not, especially in the Asian region.

From the supply chain perspective, yeah, we did this already last time. We are very close to our suppliers, and yeah, we have to make choices, yeah.

Having seen the situation last time and being in charge of the operations still, I would be definitely a bit more careful this time and just ordering and try to do everything we can for our clients, because I have seen that at the end not all clients are valuing this at the end of the day if their markets are turning, yeah.

Great. Thanks very much.

Thank you.

Then we are at the end of the call. If there are more questions, don't hesitate to contact us.

Ines and I are happy to meet you again in three months from now, and we wish all of you a nice afternoon. Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.