Welcome everybody from Ines and myself to our half-year reporting. We are both happy to present today very good numbers and also a sound outlook besides all noises around us.

Before we start with the presentation today, I also would like you would like to remind you on the with regard to the disclaimer that all statements that we are making todays are views and assumptions made based on available information at this point in time. All forward-looking statements that we are making are by nature subject to significant known and unknown risks and uncertainties.

We have prepared a presentation for you today. We start with an executive summary.

I will then hand over to Ines digging deeper into our financials. Also, the share development will be presented by Ines, and then I take back or take over again for the outlook.

We have today, as always, time for Q&A session at the end of the call. Let's start with with the numbers, and let's start with the executive summary and the market view that we are in or that we were in in the first half of 2026.

To say that the market is better or ran ran better than expected, if we look at the numbers from the German vision industry, bookings are up 25%, and billings are up or were up 9%, there is a great momentum. We also see PMIs around the world in the, let's say, important economies that we are acting in are above 50 and trending positively.

We see especially a strong development in semicon, in consumer electronics, in logistics, and in data center hardware production, which is driven by AI-related capex investments. We also see ongoing high competition intensity, especially in the Asian region.

That the US tariff situation is somewhat uncertain still. The geopolitical frictions unfortunately are rising, but we have not seen any significant impact on our business so far.

What is, let's say, coming on top now besides the geopolitical environmental situation are more and more constraints on the supply side. We see in general lead times are rising.

We also see some bottlenecks on on certain materials, and we recently, just shortly before the earnings call here, we also experienced last week the earthquake in Japan that had a disruption on the supply chain of one of our important sensor suppliers, Sony. On the FX side, we also in the second quarter we saw an development where US dollar and Chinese yen were, let's say, in not in favor, but, let's say, neutral to us, but we saw headwind from Korean won and yen continuing.

They are devaluating against the euro. What does it mean for us?

Again, strong statements here: bookings are up 60%, billings are up 36% compared to first half-year last year, which means we are clearly outperforming the industry. We have a strong order momentum, and it even accelerated in this second quarter, which gives us a good momentum and fuels the start in the third quarter or into the third quarter.

We also see very good business momentum in all regions, it's it's widely spread. However, by far the strongest momentum is in China related to the semiconductor and electronics industries.

With regard to the gross profit margin, we we were continuing our high level in the second quarter, and in total, we achieved 51.6%, we are clearly up compared to last year. EBIT almost quadrupled, this is a strong indication also of the scalability of our business model.

Ines will dig deeper into the numbers itself. Also, the free cash flow was strong even though we had also an increase on receivables.

Far, the geopolitical situation, especially on the or Iran war side, had no impact on our business. However, we have seen with the earthquake happening last week in Kumamoto that a disruption in our supply chain occurred.

This is currently under investigation and under recovery measures, and we believe that this will have an impact on our supplier so our production and supply in September and October. However, we are working hard to mitigate the risk.

With regard to the team development or organizational development, we just progressed with the mode that that you we also reported in the first-quarter earnings call, we try to keep the organization in its size as it is and scale up the revenue and also improve the gross margin, and by that, obviously, also improve the bottom-line results. You can see that we only increased, compared to mid of last year, the organization by and large 20 people or FTEs.

The split amongst the different function has not significantly changed. What we are scaling is our R&D investment, we keep it from an absolute in an absolute term, we keep it at the same level.

This means, at the moment, with a higher revenue level that we are, our R&D quota gross quota is by and large 10%, 9.5% compared to 13.3% last year. These investments are made into multiple different product and technological directions.

We have invested and and have launched products in the first half of this year in the direction of line scan systems, so-called TDI vision systems for high-end applications, especially focused on electronics and semiconductor applications. We also have launched products in this 3D realm, namely the Stereo Mini, this is mainly logistics applications that can be solved with such a stereo camera, 3D camera type or system.

We also have have entered into a new interface technology, it is called GMSL. This is in kind of the mainstream products that we are offering.

This interface has high real-time capabilities and also high bandwidth to transmit data. Last but not least, we also announced to the public one of the key innovation programs we are working on.

We also launched this on the GTC at NVIDIA, and this is all about simulating all our components in the Omniverse world in order to enable our clients to test virtually all the products and only order hardware and build up a real system once they already know what they want to choose. These innovations and projects products have been presented in multiple different occasions, some of them are stated in in this on the on the slide.

This brings me to the financials, and happy to hand this over to Ines.

Thank you, Hardy. Welcome also on my end.

Here you can see the development and also the distribution of our sales. As previously mentioned, we have a pretty good order momentum, yeah?

Order entry was up 59%. Revenue is lacking a little bit behind, but above 30%.

As you also heard, there's a growth in all of the regions, yeah? For the order entry, we really have every region above 30%, but here China is especially sticking out.

Taking a look at the overall revenue, of course the overall number is there with €152.4 million, but we also have a little bit of a distribution change with China picking up a little bit of a share, yeah, now being 29%. We see in general that the order entry is above the revenues, yeah, it's still monitored, but our customers are also placing the orders a little bit into outer quarters so that we can now, yeah, starting with a good backlog into our next quarters.

Here you can see the development again, yeah? We have, as I said, we have a positive book-to-bill and also a positive momentum in the order backlog, yeah, jumping into Q3 now with not only a good backlog, but also beginning weeks of very good demand, yeah?

This now has to be matched with the supply as you heard and as you will hear again when we go to our outlook session. Far, we need to catch up with our billings, but 36% above last year and very good development so far.

Gross profit margin, this is really to my heart because we made the second quarter above our plan. You all know that we, yeah, we are aiming for this 50%, and now for the second time with a very good revenue also, yeah?

We have a good grip because we didn't increase our workforce and can really leverage now. We of course also have the help from the currencies so that we don't have further loss.

Second time as in Q1, 51 51.6% above the 50% and well above the margins of last year. Little bit of a different picture this time in the EBIT.

We announced already last quarter that we won't see that especially high EBIT margin again because we already assumed that something is going on. Here you can see that we have a push-through from gross margin, this €1 million that we get out of gross margin also ends up in our EBIT, but we have a pickup due to a variable salary structure and also due an efficiency project to increase the automation all over.

That's why you're seeing the EBIT margin lower than the EBIT margin of Q1 and on a, yeah, on a cost level that we also perceiving at least for Q3, and then, yeah, having maybe another point in there for Q4. Good, I think this is a summary, we ran all over, right?

Again to point out the gross margin when you take a look, it's five percentage points over, yeah, and also the EBIT margin still, last year we were coming in with 7.7%, now not only two-digit, but above the 20, yeah, with, yeah, with continuing trend in not increasing the cost base so much. Here also some talks, you might have all looked into our balance sheet, maybe some talks to the operating cash flow here.

Overall it's up, but our short-term asset structure changed a bit. We are of course monitoring and steering our working capital, and working capital days for the days in receivables are up, this is coming through two factors: we discontinued our factoring because of a cost analysis that we have behind there, you see some of the factoring part which sat previously in there now walking into the accounts receivables, and we also still have the same trend in China, yeah, with customers requiring longer payment period, so that doesn't help too much in the days of receivables, but steered against with other short-term financial receivables helping here in the picture, and also getting a good grip on the accounts payable side, yeah?

That positive trend in the OCF, and with that of course, positive trend also in the free cash flow where we want to have it. This is the summary of the first picture, now as a table as you already know it.

Maybe here to point out, we have our liabilities to banks decreased to plan, we are currently now running at €40.6 million on a decreasing pass because we are getting our debts down by the quarter. Cash and cash equivalents up, should or could be a bit higher if we would have higher, yeah, conversion rate in the receivables, but definitely positive trend in here, and that's why also being, yeah, being up in the net debts with the positive effect, now only being €10 million being left €10 million.

Jumping to the share, this is, yeah, not a lot of changes as usually, you know that picture, and we don't have, yeah, much fluctuation in this one. We had a lot of fluctuation of course in the quarter, yeah, we were ending up 5th of 5th of August we were at 26.8, today a little bit of a rally, huh, we watched 24 to 26 up and down a bit, but I think the overall trend is visible and very positive from our point of view, matching to the picture that we have.

Now coming to the outlook already, it was fast one.

Thank you, Ines, taking over again for the outlook, and maybe giving you first of all an assumption that we base our outlook on. We expect for the remainder of the year the computer vision market to develop positively.

We see step by step a broader recovery. It all started more in semicon, consumer electronics, data center hardware, and logistics, but we see step by step capex investments also in other area happening that is fueling the demand for automation and for our products.

We, yeah, foresee that the trade and geopolitical conflicts will not be solved, they will most likely rise over the course, the uncertainties will stay high, and combined with the Middle East conflict makes the H2 difficult to predict to certain extent. However, we have seen so far, as mentioned earlier, no significant impact from those conflicts.

Currency volatility, we assume that more or less the currency will stay where they are at the moment, the currencies that are important to us, so that we continue to have weaknesses for the Korean won and Japanese yen and a relatively stable situation for Chinese yuan and US dollar. We believe that the supply chains will tighten more over the course of the next months, it's very important that we stay close to our suppliers, that we have a good supply and demand planning to have good transparency and match those two worlds together.

With regard to the earthquake, maybe here some more information: exactly a week ago, an earthquake happened in the Kumamoto area, which is one of the main areas in Japan where semiconductors are produced and also semiconductor machines are being produced and developed. There is one crucial foundry for us, this is the Sony image sensor foundry, one of the leading foundries in the world to supply the world with image sensors.

Due to the earthquake, this Kumamoto fab was shut down. It's still shut down and under inspection.

However, there is already ongoing measures to bring this foundry back on track, and the forecast from Sony is that the Kumamoto foundry will be back to its original productivity by mid of August. We talk about two, three months of impact two, three weeks of impact, not months, and we are on a daily call with Sony what this means to our supply chain, but we have to put this into our assumption that there will be a disruption that cannot be caught up in the next months as the foundry was running at 100% utilization already, yeah.

With regard to competition, no change. We foresee continuing high intensity of competition, especially in China and the Asia-Pacific region.

Putting this all into consideration, and with our year-to-date results, we are increasing again our guidance for 2026 from originally €247 to €270 million, now to €270 to €290 million revenue, and EBIT margins in between 12.5 to 14.5%. Beforehand, we were projecting 9.5 to 13%.

This top line is considering the hits on the supply chain. There is a clear statement from us that it's not a demand bottleneck at the moment, it's more supply bottleneck.

However, we are strongly convinced to get to these numbers, which is a significant increase compared to last year obviously. On the EBIT margin side, we are also considering, besides the variable incomes that we will have, also a payment of kind of a bonus payment to our employees.

It's not accrued yet, it's just that we reflect this in our guidance to give appropriate transparency about the thinking that we are having. We are definitely proud to present this.

We are very convinced to get there, and it makes us even more convinced to get to our mid-term guidance. This guidance is now one and a half years old, and we have the ability to get there already this year.

What does it mean? This means to us we will wait for another two or one or two quarters until end of the year to update our mid-term guidance.

Obviously, in the light of the current numbers and the current development, this looks weak to us, but please bear with us that we also want to investigate further a little bit how the markets will develop over the next two quarters. This brings us to the end of the slideshow, and we are happy to open the call for the Q&A session.

Our colleague Jan will moderate this. You can either put your questions in the chat, or even better for us, please show up your hand and raise your question verbally.

Indeed, correct. We already have one person raising the hand.

It's Trybus. I will unmute you, Malte, and please try then to unmute yourself.

Good afternoon. I assume you can hear me?

Yes,

loud and clear.

Good. Couple of questions.

The first is on the order intake in the second quarter, which was very strong. Maybe you can elaborate on which applications drove the upside or the further increase in comparison to an always very strong first quarter?

More or less the €10 million additional orders you booked into the second quarter, was it across the board? Did you see increased pull-forward effects, anything you can highlight?

We can directly jump into this. What we are seeing is what I mentioned, it's a combination of a widespread capex investments in many different verticals actually, but even an acceleration of the key industries that are driving the growth at the moment, namely capex investments in semiconductor, capex investment in consumer electronics, tablet, smartphone assembly, and other gadgets, like part sense of, and we also see significant momentum and increase in the AI-related hardware capex production.

All machines that are needed to produce the semiconductor, but also downstream to produce hardware for data centers that are in the current planning and needs to be equipped in the next quarters. These are the key verticals.

We also from an order entry got good momentum from the logistics side. This is mainly happening in the US.

This is what's behind this, yeah, even higher momentum in Q2 compared to Q1. There is also another effect into the Q2.

This is because of the fact that the supply constraints are rising, lead times are rising, and customers start to order a bit earlier, the horizon of orders that we have in our order books is longer than normal, yeah, at the moment. This is also another effect that happened in Q2.

Okay. Is that quantifiable, the kind of pull-forward effects?

Is that, I don't know, maybe 10%, 10 to 15% in that range?

It's pretty difficult, but in the range of 10-15%,

yeah. Mhm.

Okay. Then with respect to Sony issue, the upper end of your guidance range, the €290 million sales this year, does this represent the maximum capacity you might produce with respect to the supply shortage for image sensors, or is there additional kind of caution baked into, like you did earlier in the year with respect to global conflicts or whatsoever?

The main bottleneck we are talking about at the moment is really on the supply side, and the guidance we have given out at the moment is to a certain extent, let's say, under uncertainty in a way that we don't know exactly at the moment the impact on the supply side from Sony to us. They are still in investigation, and we have based on the current knowledge, we have made best guesses, and the €270 to €290 million is our best estimation based on informations that we had last night or yesterday afternoon actually, because we got daily information the last week.

This is what's put in this forecast, yeah. It might get worse, it might get even better, but this is what we see as a reasonable corridor for our guidance.

You more or less baked in to a full outage for two to three weeks with an impact then on the late Q3, early Q4? Correct.

There is a full outage of two to three weeks, and you also have to consider that there is work in progress that was shaken by the earthquake. This work in progress is still under investigation, and we have no clear information about what does this mean exactly to us, yeah.

We have assumptions that are very much shared with Sony, and I think these are sound assumptions, but we will learn over the course of the next two, three weeks what is really the impact on the work in progress, what does it mean for our supply, for our production planning. This comes on top of a two- to three-week outage,

yeah. Understood.

Then on the gross margin, that was obviously pretty strong in the first half of the year. Now, the second half might have a bit lower loading due to the capacity or supply issues.

What are your thoughts around the gross margin expectations one should have for the second half of the year?

In there, you saw that the gross margin was pretty stable, right? We had the €75 to €77 million revenue, we are basically really leveraging all of our indirect labor in the gross margin and have a flexible temporal approach in the direct labor.

If the revenue is going down, it doesn't matter if it's demand or supply, the coverage of the indirect labor will of course be lower, yeah? We are definitely not expecting this level of 51, 52-ish percent, but being down depending on the revenue level even below, yeah, 40 49, 48 in the baseline.

Then, as we said, we have baked in also into our EBIT outlook variable bonus payments, let's say, not normal variable salaries, but these will also go to the gross margin folks, yeah, to people also in production. That's why we are also expecting a hit to the gross margin whenever we decide that we are going to do that in the corridor, yeah?

Really possible that we are seeing a 47 to 49% in the next two quarters. Okay.

Then

to the supply chain in general, what are your thoughts about then going into 2027? Do you see to support stronger growth?

Obviously, order entries are supporting higher quarterly run rates, what's your view on the supply chain then going into the next year?

The view is definitely that the situation will not get easier. We are already working with our suppliers on the next year currently.

We are positive that with starting early working with our suppliers, that we create a situation where we would be able to even increase production volumes compared to this year, and then it's depending on the demand that is kicking in, yeah. It's not getting easier, to be honest.

As you know that these semiconductor processes are long, we talk about 30 weeks process time, and for many semiconductor manufacturers, the buffer stocks are empty or are low, it's foreseeable, if the demand stays high, that the situation in 2027 is definitely not getting easier. Yeah.

Many thanks.

Welcome. Thanks, Malte.

Thanks, Malte. I'm checking the chat, and I see that Lasse Stüben is also raising his hand.

Let me try to unmute you so that you can ask your question.

Hi, good afternoon. Just a slightly bigger picture question.

How are you thinking about the sustainability of the demand you're seeing at the moment? We've seen kind of situations like this in the past where maybe you would have started increasing headcount.

You've clearly decided not to do that really in a big way, at least in the first half of the year. Just trying to get a feel for, I guess, generally the outlook for opex based on your view of, yeah, demand into the second half, which seems like it's stayed strong, but maybe also into '27 and how you're kind of thinking about sizing the organization accordingly.

Yeah.

With regard to the demand, Lasse, when we talk to our clients at the moment, I can say that all of them continue to be bullish for the second half of this year, also for next year. To be honest, we as a management team, we also with the backlog that we are having, with these feedbacks that we are seeing in the market, we are also very positive for the remainder of this year, yeah.

It's more the question how we manage the supply in order to best match supply and demand. For next year, I think it is wise to stay careful at this point in time, because the demand is significant, yeah, as we can see, and we know, let's say, that the average compound annual growth rate in our industries used to be around 7%, 8%, and we believe there is no reason why this will significantly change in the future.

This means after such a high upcycle, there will be also a downcycle, and the only question is when does it kick in? It could run the full next year, this upcycle, but it could also kick in next year.

The only thing we can do as a management team and we are committed to do is to be very careful with our fixed-cost structure to make sure that we can manage all the volatility appropriately and can, let's say, with full throttle further continue our strategic path even if, let's say, a downswing will happen. This is how we see it at the moment.

Maybe adding,

that's why also you see some cost positions increase, because we are investing in times into consultants instead of own people wherever possible, because we assume that this could turn around, right? We also have an efficiency program that won't stop, by the way, next year, but that we can flexibly steer in and out of costs depending on the demand, so that we can take some of the costs out without hurting the current setup, yeah?

That's also positive, yeah.

Just let me also make this statement, we don't want to be too conservative here. The momentum is good.

There are a lot of challenges to meet the demand, and there is on the customer side at the moment an ongoing momentum also in the start of the third quarter,

yeah. Understood.

The second question, just on China, it looks like you had sort of a decline sequentially in revenues in the second quarter. I just wonder, was China more impacted on the supply chain side of things than maybe products for the rest of the other regions?

Just generally, you mentioned sort of intense competition in China, maybe you can talk about, clearly the market is growing very strongly, but sort of what are the competitors doing, and just what's changed in China, if anything at all? Yeah.

Yeah.

It is not a demand situation at this point in time, we see also the demand continue to be strong, even accelerating in the second quarter. It has to do with our supply chain.

Many of our products that we ship to China, not all, but many of them are delivered through our Singapore production site. We had more limitations on the Singapore production supply chain compared to the Ahrensburg, the German supply chain.

This is the reason for the revenue situation that you were mentioning for China in the second quarter, Lasse.

Clear. Thank you.

Then final question, just coming back to the supply chain, I wonder are you seeing much inflation on some of these components already, like we've seen in the past? It doesn't seem to be the case just looking at your gross margin, but I'm just wondering looking into the second half, are you expecting any inflation on raw materials and sort of your ability to pass that on, and whether maybe you've already done some price increases, if any at all?

Yeah.

In general, for the situation that we are in with regard to the supply shortages in the world, I think we are still in a moderate situation with regard to input price increase at this point in time. We still have net savings.

This is also one of the reasons why the gross margin is rising. However, we foresee and expect our suppliers to approach us in the second half of the year.

Typically, they come around the corner in the fourth quarter for next year's contracts, and we foresee that we will see also a higher amount of suppliers approaching us on price increases. We need to see how much this will be, how good we can defend.

With the current volume increase that we are showing and demonstrating, we have also a negotiation lever at our hands. Some of the larger chipmakers, the negotiation power that we have against them are, yeah, relatively weak or relatively small.

Okay.

Sorry, maybe one final one. Generally how does this sort of, I think we can call this an upcycle by now, even though it's just kind of two, maybe three quarters, how does this sort of differ from previous cycles, be it '22 or 2017 in your opinion?

Does this feel any different to the past?

Compared to the corona situation, at least I would say that there is not this single impact happening like what COVID happened and the demand spike, an unnatural demand spike. I think we are having more natural demand spike.

However, the investments into AI-related capex, you also see this from the big companies involved what their capex budgets are building cloud computing or data centers. I think this is to a certain extent special.

The other industries, logistics, consumer electronics, kind of normal. This kind of investment cycle, I think needs to be closely watched, yeah.

Okay. Thanks very much.

Sorry about that, was the fire alarm, apologies.

Okay. Hopefully, everything is fine on your end.

Thank you, Lasse.

Good. There is one additional question from Lucas Spang.

One second, I will unmute you. Lucas, it should work.

Hi, good afternoon to both of you. I would like to follow on the questions regarding outlook for second half and customer behavior.

Thanks for the clarification regarding gross margin in Q3 and Q4. I think that's also helpful for understanding your assumptions due to the bonus topic, which could come up in the second half.

Is there anything else we should keep in mind regarding the margin in the second half besides this effect?

I think the biggest push factor again is the leverage factor on the gross margin, yeah, because really currently happens what we always plan for, right, not increasing the workforce and leveraging the existing workforce with what we had with investments also in processes behind. This is what you currently seeing.

The 51.5 or 6% are made for around €75 million of revenues, yeah? The workforce, especially in the indirect labor, won't be that flexible.

We have a flexible direct labor workforce more or less, but not indirect labor. This is really the biggest effect.

We could turn down in some of the opex positions when we would see fit, but again, if we are kind of reaching or steering to the forecast or the prognosis that we are currently having, this is really an investment in the future that helps us with not increasing people and scaling via processes, yeah? That's why if it's not already decreasing, there is no more hit planned, let's say, or foreseen and also no, yeah, no cost blockers in also that we haven't in our hand so far, yeah.

Okay. Then on the customer behavior, you also touched this topic in the answers to Malte, but regarding the customer behavior, on placing their orders, are we just talking about, let's say, one or two quarters earlier, or are customers already placing orders for 2027?

There are exceptions where they place already orders for 2027, it's kind of a frame contract they want to make visible to us. Maybe normally, the vast majority of our order books are for the next two months, yeah, to be delivered for the next two months.

At the moment, I would say the vast majority of the order books is within the next three to four months. There is a one to two months in addition, and this also brings then us to this 10- 10-15% of the orders happened in Q2 that are placed because of a longer horizon, yeah.

Do you see this on a broad customer base, or is this, let's say, maybe just bigger customers who are showing this behavior or equal share?

Typically it's more the larger customers that have also a certain, let's say, monthly runway with us and want also to secure their supply and they have visibility to their businesses. Normally or typically it's the larger customers, not the smaller ones that act on a project base or so, yeah.

Okay. That's from my side.

Thank you.

Thank you, Lucas. More questions?

I'm currently checking. I have one in the chat as a written question.

I guess it has already been tackled a little bit. The question is: EBIT margin for half-year one is above 20%.

Forecast 2026 EBIT margin is only at 12.5 to 14.5%. What are your expectations for the EBIT margin in the second half of the year?

I guess this has been tackled already, but

yeah.

Maybe, Frank, you asked the question a bit earlier, maybe if you would like to precise something, maybe you can raise your hand. If not, I would assume that the question was already replied to if this is okay.

I'm checking. Right now, no one raising the hand, no questions in the chat.

As always, you can send your questions, of course, through our website if you have additional questions at any time. Yes, I see no additional questions right now.

Okay. If there are no additional questions, we thank you very much for your attention today, also for the questions you asked.

Whenever there are more questions, please don't hesitate to contact us after the call. We are strongly committed for, let's say, making the best out of the third quarter and reporting also again good numbers to you in a quarter from now.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Talk to you soon. Bye-bye.