Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you very much for joining us today for SECO's first half results call.

As usual, our CFO, Lorenzo Mazzini, will cover the key items of our financial results, followed by our CEO, Max Mauri, which will share with you a detailed update on our strategy, as well as some trends on our business. About our first half 2026 number, please let me highlight that this will be the sixth quarter in a row where we deliver top-line and gross margin numbers ahead of our guidance.

We delivered a solid first half performance amid supply challenges. To be specific, we made in the period significant investments into working capital with strategic purchase of memories and PCBs.

What helped SECO managing supply shortages of these components? We will dive in more details in each of these KPIs in a second, but the three key messages we want to share are pretty clear and are here in the slides.

The physical AI era is here, and the partnership that we just announced yesterday with NEURA with a new revenue stream, which will start from 2027, is a proof of it. The second message is that our exposure to structural growth trends like energy, grid infrastructure, aerospace, and defense is growing.

The third message is that our new PCDA plants in Italy and China are now fully operational, enhancing capacity and customer proximity. I now hand off the mic to Lorenzo for the presentation of our financial results.

Please, Lorenzo.

Thank you, Marco, and good afternoon to all. Let's start having a look to group's financial highlights in the first half of 2026.

Edge computing business recorded a +6% year-on-year growth, despite the difficult situation on the procurement market for memories in particular. I wanted to stress that, despite the shock in prices and lead times, which implied significant renegotiations with customer and supplier, we was able to serve the market, preserving our margin and recording such growth.

Useful to report that software recurring revenues grew in the first half of 2026 compared to the first half of 2025 by 13%, growing an increased usage of our Clea software framework. A very positive results comes from gross profit margin.

We was able to improve it despite important increases recorded at bill of materials cost level. We successfully passed part of our cost increases to customer.

The group benefited in the period also of a positive sales mix in margin terms. Adjusted EBITDA reported in the period a slight reduction, explained by a discretionary increase in opex.

The group increased its indirect personnel head count by about 20 people respect to the first half of '25, primarily in R&D, research and development, to support the strong project pipeline, and logistics to support the opening of the new production plant near Arezzo. Useful to point out that part of such logistic expenses will be reassorbed from the next quarter, on which is expected a better operating leverage driven by the volume expansion we are forecasting.

Passing to comment our sales breakdown in the first half of 2026, I want to highlight the good growth of EMEA from a geographical standpoint. It was mainly driven by the rebound of German market, which is, in term of weight, the most relevant for SECO.

Regarding, instead, the split by vertical, SECO continues to have a great diversification, with the industrial sector being, for sure, the most dynamic one. Analyzing our first half 2026 profitability performance, the EBITDA margin records a reduction of about 1.5%, driven by higher personnel costs.

The driver was spending over research and development to support the future growth, and over logistic for the setup of the new production hub near Arezzo. Part of such logistic indirect cost will be recovered already from the third quarter, on which we expect to benefit a good operating leverage levels.

Passing to adjusted net financial position, after extraordinary production capex, grows by about €6 million respect to year-end due to inventory expansion. Strategic stocks of critical memories were implemented to put in safety deliveries to customer.

Moreover, the extension of material lead times drived the necessity of increasing inventory levels. The about €18 million of higher inventory was counterbalanced by a solid cash generation, impacted at the end of the semester the adjusted net financial position by only €6 million.

I close my remarks underlining that, despite this growth in net debt, our leverage position remained close to 1x EBITDA, a level of real excellence. I thank you for your kind attention, and I pass the floor to Max to continue to our presentation.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Lorenzo, and good afternoon to everyone. Let me now work you through what are, in my view, the key highlights of this publication.

The first half was a solid top line in a very complex supply chain environment. The momentum is now clearly accelerating.

We expect an all-time high €60 million revenue in the third quarter, what is a 25% progressions year on year. Order intake is at an record level as well, up 55% year on year and in absolute terms around €50 million.

This give us a good visibility for the coming quarters and behind. The gross margin is rebounding too, back on 56% in the second quarter, up almost 4 points or 400 basis points quarter on quarter, addressing any concern on our ability to source key components and pass through the price impact to our client.

I think what is important is the fundamental behind this numbers are solid. The Clea recurrent revenue is up 13% year on year, and our book-to-bill is 1.4x.

We have also secured more than 50 new design win with different new customers and new logo, and we have internal production capacity now up to €350 million. In short, the business is healthy and is gaining traction.

Most importantly, this performance was achieved in a particular complex supply chain environment. During the first half, the electronic market continued to face components allocation constraints and significant extended lead time from the key silicon vendor, driven especially by the growing AI demand for data center infrastructure.

In this context, we proactively secured a strategic inventory of critical components, as I really think the €18 million that we increase in revenue are really good and like a gold right now to be able to fulfill and beef the customer demand. This give even greater value to the results delivered, and work done position us well to continue executing our growth strategy in the period ahead and gaining a competitive advantage.

We discussed about physical AI already in the past, but now it's tangible. It's just started.

I really think that this end market will be a strong new end market for our company. I think physical AI means when a machine start to perceive and interact with the reality.

This is exactly where the SECO offering and our technology is really competitive. I think we are one of the best company as for our position in the world to really succeed in this new vertical.

I think all our new product are AI powered by design. They used next-generation chip, and they have dedicated AI computing building.

This open new market for SECO: robotics, drone, aerospace, defense, and many other will come. I think this will accelerate our growth path in 2027 and behind.

We believe SECO is really unique positioned by combining our hardware together with our Clea platform to fulfill the markets demand. Our strategy is simple.

We build one scalable portfolio across different kind of silicon vendors and different kind of technology to really intercept growing end markets. Looking better this strategy, we are splitted across many vertical, but the most important one are for sure industrial automation, aerospace and defense, robots and drone, energy, medical, and smart device in general.

In every one of this, we offer hardware within AI built-in. More importantly, we are offering also our Clea platform on top to an end-to-end unique solution.

In terms of partner: Intel, Qualcomm, NXP, and others, I think it's important to mention that our strategic partnership are starting to pay off. I think thanks to that partnership, we can serve many customers with different kind of needs using the same strong platform.

This is how we can reduce the risk, increasing the ROI on our R&D investments, scaling our growth capacity. Let me give you a concrete example: the autonomous factory.

This is the vision under which we will see smart camera, AI powered screens, robots, and mobile vehicles all work together. This is a real ecosystem, and is where SECO is present in every part of it.

The market is going definitely in that direction. This is one of the key of our future strategy, and I think that it's really important to mention 70% of our customers tell us they want a technology partner, not just a supplier.

Why? Because the level of innovation required, it's pretty high.

The grow number along this such of vertical is pretty high. Robotic investments are expected to roughly double every year through the 2030.

I think this is a very huge opportunity, and we are build to perfectly capture it. Why we are so confident?

I think because we are offering something unique. SECO is now covering the entire value chain that is critical for a client, from the powerful Edge AI hardware to a dedicated software framework to deploy AI directly on the device at the edge, and a unique marketplace of AI algorithms.

Together, this is a full stack from hardware to intelligence to value-added services that customers can really build along our technology. I think that it's important also to underline that thanks to the strong partnership, the technology partnership that we build over the last 5 years with the main silicon vendors, this kind of ecosystem is becoming even powerful.

Talking about a developer community, here is a good example how we want to grow and how I think the partnership that we are building are really playing like an ecosystem. For example, the work that we did with Arduino and Qualcomm Arduino, by the way, is one of the largest developer community in the world.

I think having this such of community behind is very good for prototyping. When they are ready to scale from prototyping to industrialization, from samples to mass production, this is where SECO come in, and this is where our product and the fact that we design our product pin-to-pin compatible both on the hardware and software side, meaning that the migration is smooth, there is no need of writing any single line of code, and this is where the value for the customers is huge, accelerating their time to market, reducing their investments.

Let me now show you another example on a new Edge AI mission-critical controller that we are building together with Intel. This is a rugged device.

It's a fanless, it's run on battery, and works in the field. It use the latest Intel Panther Lake technology, and it has on-device AI for situational awareness.

This opened the door to a high-value defense application and very big, large customers. This example I think represents the entire SECO's strength and competitiveness that start from the design, integrating rugged system, advanced electronic design, as well as HMI display.

Now we arrive at the major announcement we made last Friday. I think SECO has signed a strong strategic partnership with NEURA Robotics, a European leader in cognitive and humanoid robotics.

SECO will deliver custom Qualcomm-based solution. Our product will be inside all the five NEURA Robot types: humanoids, personal assistants, robot arms, mobile manipulators, and quadrupeds.

In the humanoid alone, five SECO modules are on board, our content grow with the complexity of the robot. We are covering from the brain to the smart limbs of the robot, where basically NEURA, which is a unique technology from NEURA, is really having the Neuraverse platform that is basically replicate the functionality of a neurologic human-centric infrastructure into the robot.

Our computing is interact with the AI platform and make it happens in a daily basis life. I think it's important to mention that mass production is planned for the first quarter 2027 already.

I will give you more colors on the number in a while. We are also planning to deploy this robot inside our own facility.

I think NEURA is one of the best robotic company in the world, definitely number one in Europe, but really fighting to be a leader, a worldwide leader. I think we are really proud to be a core technology partner for them and to help them to scale in a huge mass production expected for the forthcoming years.

I think it's important also to give you an update on our operation and our production capacity. As we have increased our footprint and production capacity in Europe as well as in China.

We have now two basically new plant up and running, giving us a total full capacity to reach up to €350 million in revenue. Now is time to have a look to the number.

I think our incoming backlog is clearly improving, up 55% year on year in a July year-to-date basis. Our book-to-bill ratio has been constantly above 1, which is now 1.4, to be precise, already for many month.

This is not a one-time spike. This is an healthy, consistent trend that will continue over the course of the forthcoming quarters.

Now, our guidance for the third quarter. We confirm revenue of about €60 million, +25% year on year.

This will be the highest quarterly revenue in the SECO history. I'm really proud about this.

Looking ahead, I can anticipate that visibility on organic growth keep's improving. This growth is broad-based, is come from many different end market and new logos.

By looking at the order intake and book-to-bill KPI, and factoring the NEURA partnership, I feel confident in stating that markets estimate for the 2027 are a bit behind schedule. Before we will share a complete view on the 2027 later this year, as a hint on what is coming, just let me add that the NEURA agreement will count for not less than additional €25 million revenue already in 2027.

I think you should take it into account when you make estimation on SECO now on. Let me close here and thank you again for your attention.

We are now happy to take your questions. Thank you very much.

Afternoon. Thank you for taking my questions.

It's Marco from Mediobanca. Just one from my side.

In your final remarks you mentioned that you have very strong pipeline and the visibility is growing over the organic growth trajectory. The question is how confident do you feel that the €60 million revenues per quarter could be the new run rate over the coming quarters, and whether this will support, say, operating leverage to bring the EBITDA margin consistently above 20% level over the next quarters?

Thank you.

I think having €60 million in revenue in mind is clearly that we will come out with an EBITDA above 20% because the operating leveraging, which is actually pretty strong considering 75% more or less of our opex as fixed opex. Therefore, our operating leverage is significant, especially when we go over €50 million.

I think looking ahead, as I said, the market consensus was basically expecting SECO to be in the range of 200 €245 million in 2027. Now, I am adding at least €25 million in revenue coming from the NEURA partnership.

Therefore, I think the magnitude by quarter will be even higher of €60 million each. We will see how proportionally the growth will be deployed into the 2027.

I would say I would like to be more specific on it later during the year. Generally speaking, I think the expectation that we are having for as a mix in between our strong demand and strong pipe, order intake, book-to-bill, together with the new big partnership with NEURA, are now facing a target at least of €270 million for the 2027.

Very clear. Thank you, Max.

Hi. Can you hear me?

Yeah.

Excellent. Thank you very much for the presentation.

Really interesting, and happy to see that you have new partnerships. My question regards those partnerships.

From the previous meetings we had, my understanding was that your new big partner was Raspberry Pi with the Arduino boards. In this presentation, seeing as it's used mainly for prototyping, I'm wondering if something didn't go quite as you hoped with this partnership, and how it works with Qualcomm.

I'm very happy to see that you're doing pin-to-pin compatibility, but I was wondering about this particular partnership.

All right. I'm sorry, maybe you are making some confusion, because Raspberry Pi and Arduino are both SECO partnership, but are two different player, actually competitors between them.

All of them are referring to the developer market. Difference in between is with Raspberry Pi, we built a PiVision, which is entering now into the mass production phase, which is definitely good because it's adding new revenue out of this partnership with Raspberry.

The Arduino pin-to-pin compatible IQ8 design that we did based on Qualcomm chipset, it's a completely brand-new product, meaning that we are receiving a lot of demand out of it from basically all the region. Keep in mind that we will be in mass production with IQ8 later in 2027, starting by the end of first half.

Therefore, to see the results of the partnership we did with Arduino, joining the program Works with Arduino Arduino is a Qualcomm owned company we will attend second half 2027. Just to complete the picture, it's normal in our sector that when you make a partnership, you will see results after more or less 2 years from the beginning of the partnership, because this is typically the time to market that you need to wait until to grab some fruits.

I think also looking into the past what we announced, the big partnership we did a few years ago with Qualcomm is definitely now starting in having the first big payoff, but I can tell you it's just the beginning. More to come.

Thank you very much for your question.

Excellent. Thank you very much for your answer.

It was very clear. Thank you.

Hi. Good afternoon.

Thank you for taking my questions. A couple of follow-ups.

The first one, again on the collaboration with NEURA. On top of your expectation on revenues for the next year, is it expected to have maybe some additional R&D or capex in order to develop this partnership, or are you already, let's say, ready with the existing capacity and innovation you carried out recently?

Then the second one, if maybe some color on Germany, you mentioned the presentation that Germany showed a little bit of recovery. Just maybe some more color on what is the growth rate you are seeing in Germany and what kind of growth you expect over the coming quarters?

Thank you.

Right. About NEURA, I think we are well covered in terms of growth capex already for the entire 2027, at least.

We are now working on the '27 budget, under which we are evaluating eventually growth capex to sustain not the '27, but the '28 and forthcoming demand, not only from NEURA, but from all the new logo, which are not so few, that we are now analyzing, and we will come out with a clear plan later this year. I don't remember exactly your Germany.

The Germany, I think, is going well, and this is also a structural basically change, meaning that a good portion of the increasing into our ordering take is coming from there, as well as looking the pipeline, we are expecting to see Germany growing a different growth path in the '27, definitely better than in the near past.

Okay. Thank you.

Just a small follow-up again on capex. Currently, I assume €20 million, €25 million per year of run rate capex over the next few years.

Is this something that is consistent with what you are having right now?

That's correct, as a basis.

Very helpful. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, and congrats on the results and continuing momentum. Just a couple of questions from me, please.

On the NRE revenue in Clea being lower this year versus last year, does that mean that there are lesser customers currently trialing Clea? Or how should we think about the pipeline of the potential recurring contracts that you could win from customers still trialing Clea?

That's the first question. The second one, if I may ask that as well, given investments in the inventory this year, at the start of this year, how should we think about operating cash conversion from your EBITDA for the full year?

Thank you.

Right. I think on the first point, we changed completely the business model.

This is something that I already mentioned to you all, but I would like also to repeat this one because I think it's an important point. What we did was basically lowering, actually proxy to zero, the NRE fee that we are charging to the customer to adopt Clea, and to move our offering much, much faster, much easier, from a client point of view, into recurrent revenue.

We will announce something specific later this year on Clea, which I cannot anticipate, of course, today. I hope that what I told right now, it's quite enough to explain how the recurrent revenue part is growing and the NRE are decreasing.

I would expect this trend to continue, and because, ultimately, our goal is to increase and produce a good stream of recurring revenue, which is all basically 100% of EBITDA conversion, as well as all into our cash generation. On the second point, about EBITDA conversion, I pass the floor for a while to Lorenzo, our CFO, which could be more specific on it.

Thank you, Max, and good afternoon. For this year, as you have seen, we are investing a lot in inventory to secure our capacity to deliver to the customer.

We was pretty good in cash generation of about €12 million respect to the increase in inventory. I expect to get this same path in the second part of the year, in the second half, maintaining this proportion, even if the biggest investment in the inventory has already been done, we do not expect other significant investment in the inventory.

Thank you. Okay.

Okay. May I just ask one more follow-up, please?

Just in terms of the modeling for gross margin, given where you are right now, the price increases, and the visibility that you have in the order book, are you more comfortable guiding to a higher gross margin for the second half of the year? I know the market is already expecting that, but just thought I'll ask you.

In terms of the order book, can you remind us as to how quickly that typically converts into revenue? Thank you.

Right. I think on the order backlog side, we typically have between 60 days and 6 month, 2 month and 6 month, of conversion into revenue.

I would say that due to the environment in the supply chain, I think nowadays it's better counting 6 month between order book to revenue. Looking ahead in terms of gross profit margin, I think what we achieved in the first half is very good.

I think we hope to keep it also for the second half. It's really difficult for us to give you a specific color, because there are too many things that are moving, and so it's really difficult also for us to anticipate something specifically.

We think we can hold what we got already in the first half, which actually was pretty good in terms of business model from my point of view. Thank you very much for the follow-up, Bharat.

Thank you. Thanks for the answers.

Thanks.

I think let me now thank

Can you hear me now?

Apologies. Thank you for the presentation, Max.

I have a couple questions, mainly clarifications. First, on the partnership revenues, the NEURA Robotics partnerships, I assume that in 2027, revenues will be generating mostly you said from the first quarter, but I assume a gradual ramp-up throughout next year, if you can confirm this.

Second, a clarification on personnel costs, if you can help us in assuming the normalized level of personnel costs over the next few quarters and years. Thank you.

Right. I think on NEURA side, what I said, but I can repeat to you easily, is we are expecting, as a total for the '27 year, not less than €25 million additional new revenue.

Therefore, we are expecting it progressively into the quarters. Starting from the first quarter, but gradually increasing quarter by quarter, because NEURA is really thinking to increase significantly as we go the demand progressively also into the '28, '29.

We signed a very long-term partnership agreement, therefore we will have results well over the 2030 with them. On the

personnel

cost, I think this is a very specific questions. I think Lorenzo and Marco will be glad to follow up to you in a different call, specific one, because it's so specific that maybe we needed to make some deep calculation on it.

Roughly speaking, we are talking about just less of €1 million, but I would prefer my team to double-check it carefully before giving you a number.

Thank you very much again. We will be around on the street in the next few weeks.

If there are any further question or clarification, our Investor Relations team is always available. Thank you again for joining us.