Cicor Technologies Ltd
SIX:CICN
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Cicor Technologies Ltd
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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Interim Report 2023 Conference Call and Live Webcast. I'm Andre, the Chorus Call operator. [Operator Instructions] and the conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Alexander Hagemann, CEO. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you very much, Andre. Again, it's a pleasure to present our half year results of Cicor, first half of 2023. 6 months that were definitely very pleasing for all of us as more and more we see the results, the fruits of our strategy being implemented.
Like usual, I will discuss with you some of the more strategic elements, operational elements,of our first half, then followed by Peter, Peter Neumann, our CFO, who will present you the details on the financials.
So Cicor, we are a full cycle electronic solution provider. What does it mean? It means that most of our revenue we earn by manufacturing solutions for our electronic customers in electronics. But full cycle means we offer a lot of additional add-on services that are creating customer stickiness that are allowing us to book higher margins than otherwise possible in the industry.
We are very focused, very focused on our 3 core industries. That's something we do since we have announced our strategy in 2017, and it has proven to be a winning path for Cicor. Medical technology, 27% of sales with the well-known applications of hearing aids, but many more in medical treatment, drug delivery, hospital devices and so on.
Aerospace and defense, 16% of our sales. These are a number of applications where Cicor is in space. Cicor is with components of Mars. We are in civil aviation and also in defense.
And industrial, still the largest part of our business with 41% of share, even if this is growing somewhat slower than the aerospace and defense and medical Technology where we participate in latest generation semiconductor manufacturing and many other industrial applications.
We have defined a platform to grow Cicor. And this is what we announced. We announced that a few years back how we are driving our business. There are 3 pillars. The one pillar we are reiterating again and again is the complete focus on our 3 core markets because there are more sticky customer relationships. They are more profitable. And here, we can really play the technology advantages that we have as a company.
The second pillar is the establishment of a strategic customer relationship with each of our customers. We are working together with our customers as a true partner, which leads to us almost never losing a customer. We are winning customers, but we almost never lose a customer because of these very close strategic partnerships that we have, and that is one of our drivers for organic growth.
And the third element, which we have strengthened in 2021 and of which you now see the results as being a driver of consolidation in the EMS market with a focus on Europe. Now that is a slide that you have not seen before. Also those of you who are following Cicor very closely, and that is a comment on the present environment in which we are, as a general economy and also as Cicor specifically.
On the left-hand side, you see those trends. And on the right-hand side, how we are acting and how we are positioning Cicor in that environment.
First of all, we see an acceleration of EMS market growth, which a recent study has shown again. We see growth rates now out towards 2030 of roughly 7% and compound annual [ growth rate ], that is above the market growth for electronics because the share of outsourcing increases more and more.
We at Cicor are well prepared to manage that organic growth because the manufacturing infrastructure we have already supports organic growth to CHF 500 million without further major capital needed. So from what we are guiding for this year, we have 25% or more growth that we can realize before we have to really invest into more manufacturing infrastructure.
The second point, we really see this downturn of cyclical markets last year and this year, like consumer markets, communication devices, some parts of the computer market. And we also see a volatile automotive market due to technology trends and availability of materials to automotive manufacturers.
We at Cicor, and this is where I'm hitting again on this point, we are actively avoiding the so-called CCC markets, consumer, computer and communication. We also actively avoid the automotive markets. And over the years, we have significantly reduced the share of these markets in the Cicor business. That is why in this recessionary time, time of economic uncertainty, we can report strong book-to-bill rates and a strong business prospect.
The third element is the regional element of electronics manufacturing partially moving out of China and closer to end markets, what we all know as reshoring and near-shoring. And here, traditionally, at Cicor, we have a very strong footprint in Southeast Asia and have strengthened it further with our investment in Vietnam and to double our manufacturing capacity. We have still capacity available in Romania. And with Tunisia, we possess a very highly attractive new near-shoring location.
Labor shortage. If I'm asked, what is the biggest risk, the biggest problem for Cicor, I would almost always mention labor shortages due to demographic shifts that we see worldwide. And at Cicor we are investing more and more into automation of manufacturing, but also we are making big efforts in the digitization of our business processes. Here, with the full year results, we will have more to announce because we are making very good progress in the digitization of business processes.
And last element is the drive to industry consolidation because large customers, they are significantly driving to reduce the number of suppliers. And at the same time, they require a stronger capabilities, a broader set of capabilities. And here, of course, as you know, we are a driver of that consolidation, which increases our market position year after year.
Let me mention the few key messages from the first half years, where you will hear more details later, especially in the financial section commented on by Peter.
So first of all, the strength of our underlying business is very pleasing in this half year, which is really manifesting itself in the 9.5% organic growth in that difficult economic environment. And for me, personally, even more important, the book-to-bill rate of 1.1 Again, we were seeing that new orders were exceeding sales. And we were seeing that the order intake activity has accelerated during the reporting period. So after a somewhat slow January, February, we were seeing acceleration of new incoming orders.
Now the second key message is that the acquisition of our new Cicor companies was delivering very satisfactory results. I'm personally extremely pleased with the performance of our acquired companies, Axis Electronics, SMT Elektronik and what is now Cicor Digital Elektronik, the former Phoenix Mecano Digital Elektronik, all these businesses have performed to expectation or significantly exceeded our expectation. And these businesses have also driven the growth and -- but also the margin expansion of co.
So that is one of the drivers of our very pleasing operating margin, 10.7%. Again, let me repeat Cicor is amongst the most profitable EMS providers worldwide. So operating margin is very pleasing, also driven by the focus on our core markets. Now very important from an operational and financial perspective, and Peter will tell you more about that is that supply chain tensions decreased, and that allowed us return to positive free cash flow in the reporting period. Extremely important because we had to build up inventory over the past years to satisfy our customers, and now we are back to positive free cash flow. And that positive business momentum allows us to increase our outlook for the year.
Now if you look at the markets we are serving on the left, you see that we had growth, absolute growth in all our markets with the exception of high-tech consumer. We were seeing some destocking from customers in the high-tech consumer area, reducing the share from 11% to 6%. On top of that, we have actively phased out customers in that market segment that we felt were not contributing to profitability in the way we have set ourselves as targets. As a consequence, you see an increase in this first half year in the Industrial and Medical share, the strongest growth whereas we have a small reduction in aerospace and defense.
Overall, we are now talking about 84% of our business being in our strategic markets, a trend absolutely in line with our strategy. You also see on the right-hand side, we always mention that as part of the strategy, we have developed Germany and U.K. as new home markets of Cicor. And as a consequence, the sales portion of Europe without Switzerland has significantly increased.
Now a few quick remarks on the 2 divisions, and you have 2 very different pictures. The growth is truly driven by the EMS division. That is what we want in our strategy. This is what we have announced, and this is what we're doing. So the EMS division is now contributing almost 90% to our total group revenue, an increase of roughly 4 percentage points over previous year.
We have seen earlier this year a very important acquisition, Cicor Digital Elektronik from Phoenix Mecano acquired and integrated as of January 1 this year with the business delivers results ahead of our expectations and integration that is working very successfully. Together with our other operations in Germany, this leads to a total run rate of business of close to EUR 100 million.
Why do we mention this? So meaning that in the first half, we generated roughly EUR 50 million in sales from our German EMS operations. That is important to us because that is positioning Cicor as one of the most important EMS players in the German market and Germany, of course, being the largest market for sophisticated electronics in Europe.
Now to be well positioned to participate in a moving of manufacturing out of China, what our customers, of course, are doing and doing with increasing speed. We have more than doubled our factory space in Vietnam. We have formally opened that factory a couple of months ago. It's a very successful factory, very strongly positioned specifically to take medical business, where we have also installed a clean room for manufacturing of medical electronics. So Peter will comment more on the very pleasing results where we see an increase of almost 1/3 in net sales and of course, very satisfactory EBITDA margin.
We have a somewhat different picture in the AS division. In the AS division, it has reduced sales because we were seeing in the first half that one customer who had ordered very strongly in the last year had reduced demand for printed circuit boards from Switzerland, and we also have seen a multiyear contract for hybrid substrates come to an end. That led to a bit of a 10% sales decline. And meaning as a consequence that the AS division is contributing a bit over 10% to group sales.
At the same time, we are seeing a positive outlook for the second half of that division because one specific medical customer has announced a very significant increase in demand. We have done a small add-on acquisition, the assets of AFT microwave are now integrated in our thin-film business. It is from a financial perspective a very small acquisition, but strategically a very important add-on to what we do and to strengthen our position as a market leader for thin-film substrates in Europe.
So with that, with these remarks, I hand over to Peter Neumann, to report on the financials.
Thanks a lot, Alexander. Let me lead you through some of the financials, and let me start with the long-term view. As you can see, we break again some records across top line with CHF 199 million for the first half and EBITDA of CHF 21.3 million. Total reported growth is 26.2%, out of which organic growth is 9.5%.
Organic growth shows the performance excluding M&A as well as excluding FX. M&A contributed positive 20.2%, and FX had a negative impact of 3.4% due to the Swiss franc strengthening across major -- most major currencies. As you can see also, we had clearly over the past years a strong and also balanced top and bottom line performance. Diving into 2023 first half results more in detail.
First of all, strong order intake with book-to-bill of 1.11 for the first half that give us confidence for the future. Net sales we mentioned, and this is despite a negative FX impact. And it is really nice to see how the growth translates into improved profitability with EBITDA plus 42% and a 10.7% EBITDA margin, mainly driven by our EMS segment. This represents an improvement of 120 basis points on our structural financials.
With our increased asset efficiency and a stable financial result, this converted to an outstanding core EBIT of plus 57.5% increase and a core net profit of plus 86.5%. As usual, I mentioned, we are on a Swiss GAAP fair reporting standard and amortized goodwill and tangible assets out of business combination. We, therefore, report our alternative performance measures core EBIT and core net profit that takes out these impacts.
Looking into the results of our divisions, let me start first. EMS is now 90% of our company and had a strong organic performance of more than 13% growth, reaching EBITDA margin of 11.4%. And Also, EMS has therefore been driving our overall margin progression of Cicor plus 120 basis points. AS saw a decline of sales of 11.5% that has been due to the higher fixed costs obviously leading also to a lower EBITDA margins.
Now if we look into the P&L more in detail, material expenses relatively stable with some mix as EMS is growing faster versus AS. It also shows how we have been able to price for cost inflation. Higher sales nicely translated into operating expenses as a percentage of sales reducing. This is also the key driver of our EBITDA improvement.
You also see again here the amortization of M&A goodwill intangible assets with CHF 4.6 million, CHF 4.7 million rounded, that we take out in our core results. Financial results stable. Higher interest rates offset by a lower leverage that we had in the first half of 2023. And this translates into core EBIT with 7.6%, again, a new record in terms of percentage of sales and a nice progression of plus 57.5%. Our P&L clearly shows that we can price for cost inflation, and we can build margin despite FX impact.
Some more details on the sales. As mentioned here, you see the impact of the acquisitions. But also, you see how the organic growth is driven by EMS as a key performing division that has been carrying this business forward with a very, very positive growth.
Looking at our -- moving on to the balance sheet. You can see Cicor is in a strong position with a leverage of 1.55 despite the recent acquisitions that we have done in the first half. In the first half, we closed AFT and Phoenix Mecano. We have available cash and look forward from a position of strength to continue our growth strategy. This is also seen in the equity ratio of 38%, which is well ahead of any of our bank covenants. Clearly, we're in a strong position to go forward.
Cash flow. Let's move on this. As you see here, we had -- net working capital is more normalizing. And we are able to contain CapEx in this -- in the first half, it was 2.7%. Hence, it translates to a nice free cash flow pre-acquisition of CHF 5.2 million. Great news, and we are looking forward to continue to work along these lines to reduce and optimize our net working capital position, deliver strong free cash flow performance going forward.
Return on invested capital. Let me elaborate a bit more on this because this has been a measure we have been asked very often and we disclosed for the first time. There are plenty of measures of this type. Hence, let me also explain one of the definition. We are looking here at a rolling core EBIT divided by rolling average capital. And we do this one because by the rolling calculation, we can nicely capture as well the acquisition effects in our financials and in this measure.
We have a weighted average around 10%. Depending, obviously, on some intellectual discussions, it's a bit more or less, but it's around 10%. And you can see that since the dip in the COVID crisis, we have been consistently building return on invested capital and are well ahead in the last 18 months of our weighted average cost of capital, clearly delivering shareholder value.
Also some perspective on the number of shares, including the mandatory convertible bond and also our core earnings per share progression. You see here in June, we had 3.4 million registered shares, of which 251,000 were treasury shares. Outstanding shares, therefore, were 3.2 million shares. And then we have some mandatory convertible bond for which we have a conditional capital, and this is 1.2 million, 1.3 million shares, giving the number of outstanding shares and including the conditional shares for the MCN of 4.4 million.
If I then take our core net profit of CHF 9.2 million divided by the 4.4 million, you see that our core earnings per share is progressing by 45.6% to now CHF 2.08 earnings per share. Also with the share price, you can see the market capitalization. We wanted to elaborate on this that we really are transparent around the number of shares, including and excluding the mandatory convertible bond.
Some words on the 2 acquisitions, we completed AFT and the Phoenix Mecano EMS acquisition in the first half. You can see here how we have been working with purchase price allocation. We paid in total CHF 24.9 million, for which we acquired CHF 24.6 million assets. As in the past, we have done a lot of work on the due diligence internally and have focused on keeping transaction costs low. Here, in this case, 2.3% of the purchase price consideration. These acquisitions also led to an only moderate goodwill of CHF 0.9 million that you can see.
One side note here, you see also that these acquisitions came with a relatively high operating net working capital that we are now obviously see as a huge opportunity to improve as part of our synergy. To wrap up, overall, very strong results across all measures, top line profitability, free cash flow, and we believe really that you can see the results of our Cicor growth strategy delivering results.
Thank you very much, Peter. As a summary, we can say today, we are #1. We are quite satisfied with seeing that our strategy is delivering results, that both operationally and financially, we are progressing as we have planned and as we have the desire to continue further.
The second message here is that we have found a positive way after 4 acquisitions how to integrate our businesses, but also how to run the whole transactions. We are working with moderate transaction costs as we have a team in-house able to push these transactions forward. We have a very clear view on pricing of companies. And then, as I said, we have a very clear view on how to integrate these companies. And all that was contributing to the satisfying results of the first half.
Now as we have commented a few times, Cicor since last year, has strongly grown order book of close to 1 year of business. That order book has further increased, as you have heard, with a book-to-bill rate of 1.1. And that gives us the confidence that we see the second half in a positive light. And this is despite some of the recessionary trends. But of course, our projections are excluding a view on drastically changing environmental situations as far as currencies, political environment and so on is concerned, of course.
So as a summary, we are able to increase our guidance for 2023 sales from formerly CHF 360 million to CHF 400 million to now CHF 380 million to CHF 410 million. So the lower end, we have raised CHF 20 million. The upper end, we have raised CHF 10 million. So we are quite positive on and don't expect a slowdown of business in the second half.
Also on the operating results, we expect to achieve CHF 40 million to CHF 45 million, which is an increase to the previous guidance of 10.3% of sales. And as you can see, we also expect second half to be -- to deliver about the same profitability as the first half.
So with all that, I want to thank you very much, in the name of Peter and myself, for your interest and we are looking forward to your questions.
[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from the line of Emrah Basic with Baader-Helvea.
Yes, I have a couple of questions, and maybe I'll take them one by one. So the first one would be on your organic growth of 9.5%. How much of that is attributable to volume growth versus price growth approximately?
We don't report this figure, but you could expect. So my best guess would be it's 50-50 roughly, 5% in volume, 5% in price. These are plus minus 2 points, I would say. But it is roughly half-half. Maybe a little bit bigger contribution from volumes. But as a rough number, 50-50.
And have you had some price increases in place in the first half? And do you expect as well as going forward now for the second half?
Price increases are continuous. So we would expect some more pricing effect in the second half, but they would be reduced over what we have seen in the first half.
Okay. And so your largest segment, the industrial one, increased by 35%. Could you add some color on the main drivers also, for example, how much is acquired? And sort of what might be -- were the main product drivers?
So one important product driver is clearly semiconductor equipment, which might come as a surprise because semiconductor equipment has a general weakness. But the reality is that we have won a new major customer. We are here in EUVA, wafer steppers, so a new product line, and that is why we are seeing a good growth driver in that segment. Additionally, we also clearly have a portion of that growth that is acquired, especially acquired from the SMT Elektronik last year.
Okay. Perfect. Now just a quick clarification one, clarification question. You mentioned in the press release, I think, a reduction of inventories, yet on the balance sheet I think I see an increase year-over-year, but also year-to-date. Am I missing something? Is it a wrong interpretation?
We're talking mainly on the operating net working capital that we see a flattening of in a gradually reduction. And you see maybe not direct in the numbers as mentioned, because some of the acquisitions came with a very high level of inventory.
And you see -- because if you look at the 2 acquisitions we disclosed, if you just take the pro forma sales, you get above 50%, while in the rest of the company, they're much more in the 34%. And so -- but that is an opportunity for us from a synergy standpoint. And overall, it's more -- if we have a very strong growth, it's kind of in line or below the growth rate.
On top of that, if we are talking about operating net working capital, we talk about also operating inventory because we have been quite successful to receiving prepayments from our customers for our inventory. So we are willing to keep a high level of inventory for our customers, but we are asking them to cover that by prepayments, so that they -- bearing the cash burn. But in the balance sheet, of course, you only see the inventory.
I understood. That makes sense. But now overall for net working capital for the second half of the year? Or what is your expectation by the end of the year? Do you expect a reversal or kind of like some boost for your free cash flow?
We continue to reiterate that we see a normalization but a gradual normalization over a coming 2, 3 years. I don't think you should expect a massive swing, but you should see some progression gradually as we do the detailed work of driving down operating net working capital.
Okay. And then last one, if I may, and this is a bit more on -- yes, on a more high level regarding your expectations. I mean -- well, first of all, how do you expect your order backlog to develop by the end of the year? And then also, what is the expectations on your demand going into 2024 then or first half 2024?
It is, of course, extremely difficult order line, impossible of making such a long forecast. The reality is that since we have changed our sales organization, which is about a year ago, we have seen a very satisfactory increase of our new business pipeline. So I would not, from where I'm standing now, necessarily expect a reduction of the order book until year-end. But I don't feel certain enough to give a guidance on that.
The next question comes from the line of Patrick Steiner with Kepler Cheuvreux.
It's Patrick Steiner from Kepler Cheuvreux. I would have 2. First of all, could you give us more information on the lower demand coming from medtech customers and your expectations for the second half of 2023? And the second question would be, you talked about this multiyear contract for hybrid circuits that ended. What's the impact on revenues, margins, utilizations? How do you proceed going forward with that?
So the reduced demand from this medical customer was the counter effect of a very high pent-up demand that customer had 1 year ago. That customer had suffered in 2021 of not being able to obtain electronic components. So that in 2022, they had increased that amount and now it has normalized. So that is more a normalization.
We are seeing in hybrid substrates, we had a multiyear contract, which is now coming to an end or has come to an end at the beginning of the year. It had an impact, which very much is in line with the reduction of sales that you see here and which will be compensated in the second half with increased demand from another customer.
So the AS business, the AS division is very small. So individual contracts can have an outsized impact on overall sales. And that's why we saw the reduction in the first half, and we are positive for resurgence in the second half.
[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from the line of Richard Frei with ZKB.
Three questions, if I may. The first one is a quick one on the guidance. So just to clarify how it is to be read. So upper end in sales in accordance to upper end, the EBITDA. And lower end sales in accordance with lower end EBITDA. Because otherwise, if I take the lower end EBITDA with upper end sales, I end up with a margin below previous year's margin.
Makes sense. That is a proper assumption, yes.
Okay. And then you didn't mention potential acquisition plan. So are you basically now on hold, integrating all acquisitions you've done? And then probably next year, acquisition action will start again? Or are you still looking at market and have probably some prospects already in the pipeline? So maybe give us some color here.
So from first half results, we can see that the integration of the acquired businesses was very pleasing. Of course, the SMT acquisition is already more than a year ago. Axis acquisition as November 2021. So the only major acquisition this year as of January 1 is Cicor Digital Elektronik, so the division we acquired from Phoenix Mecano. And here, we are according to plan. Therefore, we have only low workload remaining from the integration.
And as a consequence, we are having an active M&A pipeline. But like before, we are very careful and selective. So we are not putting ourselves under pressure to announce anything in the next days or weeks while we are having a quite active acquisition pipeline. And we are having, as you have seen, as Peter has alluded to, we have a low leverage, very modest leverage. And therefore, we are clearly capable from our financial profile to do acquisitions in the second half.
Okay. And the last one regarding AS division even if this new contract now starts to ramp up in second half, the share of the group got smaller and smaller. So is that still some type of core business? Or do you probably have ideas in the future to divest?
Yes. So far, I can say that it is part of the Cicor USP that we have the strong knowledge on microelectronics, on substrates, and I can tell you that we are winning certain businesses in EMS businesses also because we have this capability. And this is specifically in the medical field, but also on some semiconductor equipment businesses.
Therefore, we consider that business strategic, and that is the present situation. Of course, I cannot speak about what will be in 2 or 3 years. But we consider these businesses strategic. You are right. They are a relatively small share of our overall businesses, which is according to our strategy because the AS division business is very asset-intense. So it is much less easily scalable than the EMS business. And therefore, the EMS business is where we will continue to drive our growth.
But still, AS we consider strategic because of the synergies and its contribution to the USP of Schaffner because our competitors don't have this capability and it really sets Cicor apart.
Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question. I will hand over back to Cicor for any closing remarks.
Yes. Thank you very much for your interest. It was a pleasure to talk to you and to listen to some of you who are participating in the discussions. I personally feel especially happy that what we have announced as our growth strategy in 2021 has not only shown some first results in last year, but that we are continuing this year.
So from a strategic perspective, I'm really pleased about where we are standing now and that the strategy is shown to be successful. On the operational side of our underlying business, it is also pleasing to see that order intake is very strong because we have chosen to be in markets that are less cyclical than other markets that we have discussed. So therefore, we are positive about the outlook of the company and we'll clearly continue on our path as you know us.
Thank you very much. Have a great day. I wish you a lot of success in what you are doing.
Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now over. Thank you for choosing Chorus Call, and thank you for participating in the conference. You may now disconnect your lines. Goodbye.