All right, I've just unmuted. Good morning and a warm welcome from my side. My name is Heiko Komaromi, and I will moderate you today through the half year results of Sensirion for the year 2023. As always, by my side, we have our CEO, Marc von Waldkirch, and our CFO, Matthias Gantner. The agenda looks as follows. Marc will start with the review and highlights from the first half year of 2023, and give an outlook about the strategy. After that, Matthias Gantner will follow up with a deep dive into our financial results of this half year. Followed by a further outlook of Marc. Then at the end of our session, you will have the opportunity to have a roughly 30-minute Q&A session with all the attendees. In this regard, I kindly ask you to type your questions into this tool. This helps us to reply to your questions in a nice manner at the end of our session. Without further ado, I hand over to Marc. Let us start our session. Thank you, Heiko, for the introduction, and also from my side, a warm welcome to this earning call today, and thank you for your interest in Sensirion. Let's start first with a short executive summary. After three very successful years, Sensirion was actually hit by pretty strong headwinds in the first couple of months of this year, and this means in appliance and consumers. I think that's also one of the very important key points today. If we have a look into the breakdown of markets, we see two different contradictory, contrasting categories of markets. On the one hand side, we have medical and automotive. They have, again, achieved some, some growth, and on the other hand, we have this very significant drop of sales in appliances and in consumer markets. I'd like first to spend some minutes to explain to you again, we have already done that in our profit warning call in beginning of July. Again, I'd like to give more light into the reasons and the effects to describe why we have this significant drop in revenues in appliances and consumers. I think the revenue drop there is, can be explained by three different aspects. They are combined to each other. On the one hand side, what we have seen, and this was not foreseeable at the very beginning of the year, is that our OEM customers in these two affected markets, they see a significantly lower end consumer moves to invest into all these kind of table-based air quality sensors, air purifiers, and so on. There's definitely also this generally lower end consumer demand is definitely also driven by inflation aspects or the weak economic situation in China. On top of that, there was also an effect which amplified this revenue drop due to the pandemic-related overconsumption of products in these categories. During the two years of pandemic, the people were highly concerned about the air quality in their residential room. Some of them, and this is our expectation today, some of them, they decided earlier to invest into new air purifier and all this, and this increased the sales in the last two years, and the people are now missing to invest into new air purifiers this year. There it will take some time to come back to a normalized situation where you have a very balanced situation between those consumers, they have already bought one, and those, they are now in the moment to buy a new one. You have a kind of an overconsumption of the end consumer in the last two years, pulling back the sales at that time, and now they are missing. We are now at the opposite situation compared to last year. The third element, this is the well-known destocking effect, which is not limited to appliances and consumers only, but definitely also in these markets. Combined with the two first effects, we have these destocking effects. Unlike many other electronic companies, we were able to deliver all the orders in the last two years. 2021, 2022, definitely, we had some slightly large lead times at that time, but at the end of the day, there was no backstock at all. We could actually fulfill all the orders placed by our customers this year. That's a tremendous achievement for the company, and it's also extremely important to establish or to maintain the very close customer relationships we have, especially with all the single source customers. We are deeply convinced that to do so and to do this great result in terms of delivery capability during the allocation phase is an extremely important fundament, foundational for the long-term relationships to our customers. Short term, this is a drawback, to be honest. That means we cannot work on the backlog today because there is no backlog. Compared to some other electronic companies, this is what definitely also was another good point to stabilize and to balance the revenues for last year to the ones we are commenting today. I think it's, again, for me, very, very important to highlight and to emphasize that the reduction we are discussing today is driven by reduced volumes only. There is no customers or any other kinds of businesses we have lost in the meantime. All the customers are still with us, or they are even working on new designs with us, but what they have done is just to place significantly lower numbers of orders in the last couple of months. If we have a look at the mid and long-term view, then we are, and we keep to be extremely optimistic. On the one hand side, this is based on the fact that we see that all these mega trends of health, of climate change, of energy efficiency, they're even stronger compared to the very same mega trends 2 or 3 years ago. A lot of them are supporting the use of sensors for their respective applications across all the markets, not just appliances and consumers. Secondly, if we have a look at our pipeline of R&D projects, where design wins are already given or granted by our customers, we are now working on the designing process together with our customers. Also, this gives us a very good visibility about the opportunity in the next couple of years. It's not fully clear when the start of production will be, this month or another month, at the end of the day, projects are very concrete and are already in the pipeline, and we are working on them. This brings us also to a kind of a contradicting management situation we are in. On the one hand side, we have revenue drops, and as explained, and secondly, we have the full pipeline of R&D projects for future growth in the next couple of years. Based on this kind of trade-off, we have decided, together with the board, to continue to invest into our resources in order to support these mid and long-term initiatives, and as a drawback, to accept to have an even higher volatility of our EBITDA margins. This exactly is also the reason why we have the significantly lower profitability compared to last year. On the one hand side, anyway, in our businesses, our products are based on a pretty limited number of variable costs and a pretty high GP contribution. That means wherever we have any short-term changes of the revenue of the top line, this will over proportionally hit the EBITDA in positive ways, but also in negatives. In the last three years, we have seen the opposite. That means our revenue top line increased significantly, the EBITDA grew up to high levels that are even higher than 30%, compared to our midterm guidance of 17. Almost the double of those of the levels we have indicated by our midterm guidance. This year, we see the very same effect, just with the other side. That means in the negative way. This combination of a low variable cost contribution to our products, which brings a high volatility on the EBITDA compared to the top line development, combined with the fact that we have decided to continue to invest into additional R&D resources to support the full pipeline of R&D projects. This resulted actually in this significantly lower EBITDA levels we are indicating, and we have already indicated in July. In terms of full year guidance, we have already given you an update in July. We confirmed this expectation in terms of top line and gross margin again today. In terms of EBITDA margin, we are slightly more cautious compared to the July indication. There is actually two reasons for that. On the one hand side, we like to emphasize and to address again, that the EBITDA margin is highly depending on the top line development. Definitely, we have on the top line this kind of range, and this has also been reflected in terms of EBITDA. Secondly, we have also address-- we are addressing now the weak U.S. dollar compared to the level we had at the moment of our call in July. I come back to this full year guidance again at the end of the presentation. Now, I'd like to focus shortly on all the four markets after this introduction work. In automotive, I think this is one of the two markets they achieved a good and stable and resilient growth. We have seen that there is a pretty resilient demand of all the products in our existing business in automotive still today. On the one hand side, the growth, growth was actually contributed by additional projects in the module business, so in the Tier 1 business, where we are serving the OEMs directly, and they actually, some of these projects already awarded two years ago, they now contribute to the growth of the automotive market. This was mainly products for OEMs here in Europe. In medical markets, this market was, could you flip the slide? Thank you. This market was, again, influenced by the one-off of last year. The one-off of the CPAP replacement came to normality. That means there is no further one-off in the results of first half of the year. All in all, we had a decrease by 13%. If we adjust these figures due to this one-off of last year, we had a significant growth of 44% in our existing core business. There, this was mainly driven by some short notice and demands of China. I'd like also to be very honest on that, we are not, we are not convinced that this level will continue in the next couple of months, but also in medical, we expect some destocking effects, which will be likely to hit the revenues of the second half of the year. This 44% is probably not the full number, a sustainable new level. Some words about appliances or industrial. Industrial is actually a pretty broadly diversified market, but one of the main core aspects here is appliances. I have already commented the fact sales, air purifiers-... the uncertain. On the other hand, we had also, we have also in this market, heating, ventilation, air conditioning business. We have semiconductor business and then some other industrial applications. What we have seen beyond the appliances is the significant drop. We have seen a pretty stable situation in gas metering, but also a weaker situation in the semiconductor industry. This is also reflecting volatility of the semiconductor markets today. Last but not least, the consumer markets, there we have more or less the same situation as in the industrial market, with one differentiator. That means consumer is significantly less closely diversified compared to industrial markets. Here we see the full picture of the volatility of consumer demand at the moment. More or less, this is the picture within appliances, the consumer seems to be very similar with all these effects I have explained at the very beginning. Before I handing over to our CFO to comment the, the figures, I like to give you more comfort and also more insight into the mid and long-term outlook. I have already explained before that we are very optimistic about mid- and long-term view, thanks to the megatrends, but also thanks to the fact that we have a lot of exciting new projects already awarded by our customers or very close to be awarded by our customers. I'd like to give you some more light in today. On the one hand side, we have one growth driver, which is very well aligned to our growth strategy we have already presented in March 2021, there is no significant change in that. This is the fact that in the environmental sensing region, that means all beyond humidity and temperature, we have introduced the very first generation of products between 2018 and 2020, and now we are working on the second or even the third generation. All these product approach, internal projects, they are developing extremely well. In carbon dioxide, for example, the second generation you see here in the middle of the three figures, of the six catches. This product is already in the market for the last two years. Now we are working on an even smaller miniaturized version, for CO2 measurements. In particulate matter, we are very close to launch the product for which is significantly more miniaturized in the second generation, and the very same, taking slightly longer, is about formaldehyde. What is now the indication for you about all these projects? We have learned already in the last 20 years in humidity and temperature, that whenever we can miniaturize a product while keeping the performance, and simultaneously in semiconductor industry, also by miniaturizing, also by to, to be able to cut costs, you can drive markets over proportionally, because you can enable and open up new applications. They are not open for as long as we are talking about more bulky or more costly sensor solutions. For example, in carbon dioxide, we started first with this, this business card size, the CO2 sensor. We are now on sugar cube level, and our next step is actually our ambition. This is a very ambitious goal, which is not, which is not existing in the market, to bring down CO2 measurements to chip level only. By doing so, we can also drive new applications that are not yet part of the business world today. This is already our growth or success story about humidity in the last 20 years. At the very same is now already ongoing with CO2, particulate matter, and formaldehyde. There is also another mid-term opportunity that's about this kind of new, a completely new product family of gas leakage sensors. This was already part, very shortly summarized in our Capital Markets slides two years ago, but now it's reality. That means we see an additional popping up new market of gas leakages for a new category of coolants in air conditioners. The, the coolant industry or the air conditioning industry, they are forced to replace the old coolant to a new one because of the GWP effect. That means the effects to the climate change or the global warming. That means from, especially in the US market, from the 1st of January 2025, they can only use the new one. The drawback of the new coolant is the fact that they are pretty flammable. For starting from a minimum volume of coolant used in the air conditioners, they have to introduce a gas leakage sensor. This is exactly the point we came in. This is the new market emerging now, because in the old, with the old coolant, with the old air conditioners, it was not needed to have any kinds of gas leakage sensors on board. Now it is. We are very tentatively working on solutions, that you see here, a sketch of this kind of module based on chip technology we have inside, in-house. We expect to have the very first production start at the end of 2024. To be prepared for this significant change in the US market, starting in 2024. Last but not least, I like to summarize again that we have also a long term, this is definitely not mid, this is long term orientation. That means this complementary business area for Sensor as a Service, where we are moving from being or serving only as a kind of a hardware supplier to our OEM customers, more to a full solution provider, where we are selling. At the end of the day, we are selling data coming out of our sensors and not just the hardware. There, we are working on the very same two aspects of methane leakage, which is heavily supported by the mega trend of climate change protection. Secondly, about condition monitoring, it's more close to the Industry 4.0 mega trend. On the last slide, for your reference, that I, for the sake of time, I don't like actually to dive into all the details there. Definitely for your reference, as always, the strategic achievements, I think I can summarize this slide in a way that we, I'm very positive about the strategic achievements and progress we have made in the second, in the first six months of 2023, despite the fact that in the running business, we had a significant drop of revenues. This is to, is a parallel. On the long-hand side, we are fully focused on our strategic development of the company, which run absolutely according to plan. Secondly, these headwinds we have to cope with in terms of develop, top line development in this year. That brings me to the end of these comments, business-wise, and I'd like to hand over to Matthias to comment the, the balance figures in detail. Yes, thank you, Marc. Good morning, and warm welcome also from my side. I'm pleased to comment on the set of figures of first half of 2023, although they are not that impressive as we had this in the previous periods. Having a look at the, at the key financial and just pick up here again, the, the topic of the, strong hit on our profitability. I think with a weaker course of business we experienced in the first half of this year, and the given cost structure, Marc already elaborated on that, the low portion of variable costs, the high level of optimization. On top of that, also this cost -ups that we definitely and thought we spend on R&D and sales forces to empower and to lay the basics for next growth steps for medium-term growth targets, need to drive this R&D projects and empower the sales forces where needed. This in combination definitely gives a strong hit on our profitability. It ends with the EBITDA margin in with 8.7%. In absolute numbers, it's CHF 10.7 million compared to the weak revenue with CHF 123.2 million recorded January to June 2023. All in all, you can be sure that we are very closely at these weaker metrics for this period, looking on all these numbers. On the other hand, our, our worry lines, as Marc already mentioned, smooth out when we put our medium and long-term growth opportunities next to them. We are really positive about that. I think, but that's not relieve us from, from really have a close look at the, at the numbers as they are per today. On the numbers for the H1, in, in detail, starting with the revenue, we recorded, as mentioned, the revenue with CHF 123.2 million, with a decline of 25% overall, compared to H1 2022. Taking out the extra business or the one-time business that we booked in previous period, I think the decline comes down to 18%. Addressing the FX effects here, we calculate a minus of CHF 4 million. For the top line, this is mainly dominated by the weaker US dollar. In general, the strong Swiss francs also brings negative impact from other currencies, Korean won, Japanese yen, and euro. About the gross profit, out of the cost of goods sold, the adaptation of the variable cost components that we have in our added value chain, that was initiated in time. This relates mainly to reduced temporary and lead staff. On the other hand, the high optimization limits the downscaling options, however. After periods with very high gross profit margins, around 16%, now we are back on the midterm 50% range. That definitely is also part of our midterm comp-. The extra ordinary high utilization of our fab facilities, of course, is now gone. We are back on a normal utilization or even in some areas, in an underutilization, coming with a weak course of business. Also, here, we have to think that we just started up to fill up the fab in Hungary. Of course, also this with the effect of lower volumes in our production lines, this brings a kind of underutilization here. Talking about the overhead, R&D, SG&A, here, we have this mentioned cost -ups, further invest in new resources, in additional project teams, definitely to follow and to work continuously on these midterm and long-term projects, to cover all the megatrend topics that we want to address to definitely have the basics for further growth volumes. In parallel, of course, we also had to reflect the worldwide inflation. When we look at the cost setup that we have in 2023, I think here we also have to record salary adjustments higher than we had this in prior periods. With this top-down calculation, gross profit and overhead, of course, it ends up with this mentioned CHF 10.7 million EBITDA. And the lower chart here on this slide, definitely illustrates again, the strong impact on reduced volumes, this negative leverage, this negative economy of scale that we have, losing a lot of gross profit with a lower revenue and top line contribution. Looking at the P&L, top down, what we haven't we addressed yet, below the EBIT, we see the finance results here also, we have impact from the FX assets that we hold on our accounts. This is mainly driven by that, that we have here unrealized and realized FX loss in the balance. When the bottom line, we are down with a profit for the period, down to a very low 1.4 million Swiss franc, but still a positive result at the top line. Some work on net working capital and the bound capital in our company. I think we have mentioned that in earlier meetings already, that we are definitely proactively building up inventory for all crucial components. Here we talk mainly about raw materials, wafers, where we kind of build up our own insurance for future shortages in the supply chain. I think as long as our main supplier for wafers is located in Taiwan, and you are all aware of the trade war, geopolitical situation we have there, we have taken, started the initiative to build up our wafer inventories to a higher level, to take out the risk of shortages here. This definitely comes not alone with the risk of additional obsolete stock. I think we have a good experience in how to storage all this material, and we see no additional stock for obsolete risk there. Talking about CapEx, I think as mentioned, mid-term, long-term, we are still positive. We continue with the refurbish and the expansion of our fab capacities according to the mid and long-term plans. In the first half of 2023, we spend around CHF 50 million for CapEx. This is mainly allocable to the fabs in Switzerland and in Hungary, where we definitely want to get prepared for the next growth steps. In terms of Hungary, we bring them in the position that we can transfer the more mature products to that new site and to have new spaces here to start ramp-ups and to do continuous development in the production phase already, especially here in Switzerland, and to mature the products before we transfer them to other sites. With this more bound capital and the cash out for CapEx, I think, based on a, on a quite small operating or even negative, operating cash flow, of course, the free cash flow then, calculates in a minus close to CHF 20 million. This is the impact of our, of our continuous, spendings that we have, that we proactively have, because we see this, period definitely as a bump, and a temporary bump, and, so we continue with all our spendings. This brings me already to the last slide, a look or here, no, sorry, here, another, look on the cash flow just illustrated. Okay, it's just the, the calculation that we saw in the table. Last but not least, the look at the, at the balance with the reduced and smaller cash box that we have, reduced by CHF 20 million. The next cash is CHF 102 million as per end of June. Still a strong balance sheet. This, with this strong balance sheet, I think we have a, a good resilience. I think, we can, drive here, on our projects. We can support our projects, even in periods with weaker market demand on a continuous way. I think also to train people to improve our, running processes, definitely to start in a better shape when the demand of the market picks up again. Looking at the balance sheet overall, I think apart from the mentioned change of cash versus PP&E and inventories, all the other positions are more or less stable compared to end of year 2022. With this, I would like to conclude my remarks and hand back to Mark. Thank you. The remaining slide is all about the future. I like to highlight first that short term, the visibility remains pretty low due to the geopolitical, but also macroeconomic challenges. All these de-stocking effects and all what we have discussed already before. We have already updated our guidance in July, so I like just to refer again, that the revenue is actually expected to be anywhere between CHF 235 million and CHF 255 million. More or less, if you taking the base of H1, we expect to have a more or less flat situation for the second half of the year. The gross margins would actually be stable as expected. There is no change, not even to the ones we have, that the guidance we have shared with you in March, is more the exactly same guidance as in March already. In EBITDA margin, I have already explained it shortly before, we are slightly more cautious compared to the ones we have given you in the update of July. Taking into account three effects, first of all, that anyway, the EBITDA margin is highly influenced by the top line development, therefore, gives additional statement of depending on the top line development. Secondly, also, to reflect the lower US dollar situation and to reflect also H1 results. Longer term or midterm, we like definitely to highlight again, also to confirm fully our midterm guidance given in 2021, in March. I was asked several times the last couple of weeks about what is actually the base you, you can take to calculate the 10%-15% growth rate on average for over a cycle, three - five year. We have shared this midterm guidance with you in March 2020. I think it's fair to take the base of the full year results 2020, definitely without these one-offs of medical ventilator, because this is not part of the core business, and it's anyway gone as expected already then. Base is the 2022 results, 2020 results, to be precise, 2020 results, without the one-offs. We feel absolutely comfortable to confirm these figures of 10%-15% growth rate on average over the cycle, and also we like to confirm explicitly again, the average EBITDA margin of 17% over cycle. Definitely also reflecting the high volatility, depending on the core or the nature of our business. That brings me to the end of this presentation today, thank you for joining with us, and we are very open, very glad to answer your question now. All right. Thank you both, gentlemen, for this very nice explanation. We will now go into the Q&A session, and I will now go into the chat and read out the questions as you have put them in. The first question from Mr. Mülle r is: The low margins are frightening investors. What measures could you take to reduce sharp, such sharp drops in margin in the future when volumes drop or are low? What can you do to anticipate such low volume periods and take necessary measures as flexible work time or short time work? Thank you for this question. I think definitely what we are taking anyway, as a core part of our culture, whenever we learn more, we like also to take the lessons learned to make it better in future. I think this is deeply established in our culture. Definitely, if it comes to forecasting, very honestly, this was not a good forecasting we have done at the very beginning of the year. We have already taken some lessons learned. We like also to make our forecasting tool more sophisticated. In the core, the forecast is based on line by line, bottom up approach, based on the discussions we have with our core and OEM customers. Definitely, this is also a lot of other inputs, like our own gut feeling. Our first analysis actually brought to, brought the, the effects of the results, but we had to see that this was not even foreseeable, this sharp drop in appliance and consumers for all our big customers. All of them are actually surprised in the very same way as we did. There was this kind of surprise for the whole business. And definitely all these effects, as I have explained, was additionally amplified by de-stocking and the overconsumption last year. I think we can say on the one hand side, we can do it better, and we take our lessons learned about forecasting ways. Secondly, we have also to summarize that we are now in very extraordinary times. I, I've been with the company for 17 years, more, most of the time, also part of the executive board, and I cannot remember any time in the last couple of years where we had the significant changes. Not just the one now, on the negative side, but also the one in the last two years on the positive side. So these moves, these very so short-term changes, which are not anticipatable, is actually phenomenal, which is probably also linked to the pandemic situation. Also in 2021 and 2022, I'd like also to highlight that again, we have noted all the time that some of this additional core business very likely to be just to, to inventory, exactly this is now what we are suffering from. We definitely, I can confirm that again, we like to do it better in future. How can we react on cost blocks? I think there is another situation in terms of variable cost or so operation close cost blocks, we have taken first decisions already in January, February, that we have reduced our capacities with temporarily with reduction of investment plans and so on. I think there we have already done our homework that is also reflected by the fact that the gross profit margin was more or less stable. In terms of sales and R&D, we have two aspects. We are not that fast to react. On the one hand side, that's the main aspect, we don't want to react because it's a completely online system. On the one hand side, with R&D and sales, we are working on projects for the next years. If we are cutting resources there, we are not we definitely, we can slightly, but just slightly, stabilize the EBITDA short term, but we are jeopardizing the future opportunities. On the other hand, the other effect, it affects that there is also some latency. Whenever you are hiring new people or you decide to hire new positions in R&D and sales, let's say, mid of last year, where there was more than sunshine, it takes you more than half a year, definitely, to get these very talented and very specialized R&D guys, and from then, you have the impact on the, on the cost block. It takes you half, up to one and a half years to have the full picture on the P&L. That means you have no chance to react on short term without a hire and fire policy, which is definitely destroying the culture and also the branding of the company to attract good talent. In our review, also together with the board, we came to the full conclusion that this is not the good story for the company. We like to be a very effective employer, to attract the best talent from all the and adjacent universities, and to have there, also in R&D and sales, some kind of flattening the development of people, and that means not to go into hire and fire policy. That means, but on the other side, that we have these cost blocks growing in another way as our very fast and extraordinary fast ups and downs in top line. The result of that is volatility in EBITDA. I'm pretty optimistic. It's very hard to say anything about future, but I'm pretty optimistic that this very strong volatility should be and remain extraordinary. Whenever we have the pandemic behind us, all the outcomes of the pandemic, we should also come to more silent water in future again. All right. Thank you very much, Mark, on your explanation on our costs and savings. In the following, we have a question from the same gentleman, but I would like to combine it with the question after that. The first question is: Do we plan to make any special efforts to get new clients or new products for new clients, new areas? How do we grow? The next question, I think we can combine it, is that we speak about growth in midterm and long term, but would we already expect growth for 2024 or only for 2025? Well, definitely, we are not initiating any extra efforts to gain additional customers, because hopefully, we are already approaching all the potential customers we like to gain for our products. So I, I have a deep conviction that we do our very best in order to have all the customers they are, from a business perspective, also worth support, to support. That means to do now an extra effort, it doesn't make sense, especially we are in low-end business. That means to have any kinds of discount initiatives in order to shortly trigger additional sales, it will not pay out, because at the end of the day, whenever a car is sold at the OEM, we are selling a sensor for the car. Whenever a fridge is sold, we are doing the very same with our sensor. Whenever we are reaching out to our customers to trigger them to place more orders now, potentially, they can do it if they get a good discount. At the end of the day, it's just for inventory. Our sensor is not as decisive in terms of cost, that the car is significantly cheaper when we are lowering our prices. It doesn't make sense to have a short term initiative to give discounts in order to stabilize top line. New clients, definitely, we do our very best in order to reach out to all of these customers, also to get engaged in design and process. It project, but it takes 2 years at least to come to a start of production for all these customers. In 2024, 2025, we are very optimistic, but it's too early to say, to give that in figures, that there will be new growth next year. Definitely, what we have are new projects coming to production next year. This is already a pretty good visibility, which is not that good in visibility, is about the economic situation and our running existing business, where we are suffering this year. We are already optimistic for 2024. Perfect. Thanks a lot, Mark. Following question from Mr. Renato Huber. He wants to get more insight into your explanations about the medical market in China, and he's interested to learn if you have gained new customers, against who, so who did you win? Why do we expect an inventory build up there? Well, no, it, this 44% quarters of growth in medical is not attributed to one customer, which was now, is now on board and start to produce. Yeah, well, definitely there's always new programs starting up, sometimes with existing customers, sometimes with new ones. What we have also experienced is that, during the pandemic, we served significantly more medical customers, especially also in China, and they were not used to be our customers before the pandemic. The reason for that was actually that we were willing also to support all these customers in the, in the area of ventilation, medical ventilation, compared to our competitors that were all located in U.S. The U.S., several manufacturers, they were not allowed to support any medical ventilator manufacturers outside of U.S. This was a good chance for us to serve additional customers. We work with success, and this can actually be stated now, three years after this extra initiative 2020, that we could convert a lot of these extra customers during the pandemic to be or to become sustainable customers also after the pandemic. This definitely is supporting the base of our medical business, but cannot be explained, cannot explain fully the 44% growth in the first half of the year. Therefore, also my comment, I think this is more a kind of a fluctuation, which is also we are looking into a market in just six months. At the end of the day, already one or two orders, they are extraordinary, but means we are talking about some millions, can influence this growth rate significantly, and it's probably you cannot just take this for granted, but also to have the very same picture in the second half of the year or for 2024. I'd like just to reduce there the expectations that the 44 is also not a kind of a sustainable growth rate driven by any extraordinary customer sitting in. Thank you, Mark. On the topic of gas leak sensors, you explained the situation about the U.S. and the change and what is driving the adoption. Now, the question is, if we are also benefiting from the spread of next generation of heat pumps in Europe and worldwide? Yeah, that's a good question. I think it's not, not yet that concrete, definitely heat pump is one of the business we are looking into. It's also depending on the coolants there and the way how they are done. Definitely, heat pump is one of the topics we are looking into, and we are also engaged with, with some customers. It's not yet so concrete that we can say, "Okay, we are very close to start the production for this respective project." Thanks. A concluding question from him is, why do we have administrative costs increased by 14%? Did we have any one-off expenses there? You like to comment that, or? No, no, extraordinary positions there. I think, yeah, as mentioned, the one is, of course, salary adjustments. The other is definitely also in this period, bringing in the basic setup of the staff in Hungary, strengthening also administration forces in the U.S., where we also in parallel strengthened our sales force, especially. This is SG&A overall. I think here we have now a much more better setup just to support automotive business and projects, prospects, to follow up there. I think that's the driver in that. Thank you, Matthias. Now some questions from Mr. Sandeep from JPM. What are end markets showing since we lowered the guidance? Has any end market at all shown any improvement since the profit warning? No, I didn't think so. I don't think so. I think it's more or less a stable situation, also due to the fact that between our profit warning in July and today, this is actually more or less summer seasonal holiday season, so in a lot of, of other companies as well. I think there was no significant change in the meantime. More or less, we can take the very same conclusion as we have already shared with you in July. Thank you. I think we addressed this, as we did else. Given the slower growth rate, are we going to keep the growth of operating expenses at the same trajectory? Operating expenses or more? Well, I think definitely what we are doing is that, again, we like R&D, but also sales, and slightly linked to that, also some administrative support, is not on short-term adjusted due to the top line development. What we are doing, and we have done already for more than 20 years, is actually to adjust these expenses according to the opportunities we see short, mid, and long term. There we are optimistic, and this is reflected by the fact that we have continued to expand, expand the R&D spending. There was also other times, for example, 2020, we had this chunk, thanks to the roll-out of medical ventilators. There we have seen that it doesn't make sense now to hire a lot of people, but to be more cautious because there was not a concrete number of new projects we had actually to support. Secondly, we're not that fully clear about the situation. Therefore, we have not invested or converted this additional top line into R&D immediately, and this resulted in a very high EBITDA margin. Now, it's the opposite, that means we have this weakness of the top line, but on the other hand, we see that we have this good portfolio or pipeline of R&D projects to be supported, and therefore we also now we decide to do it according to the pipeline and not according to the top line. Mm-hmm. Another question, I'm sure you have addressed, any early look into the 2024 trends or 2024, or how about the visibility? Maybe a short. I think, again, unfortunately, I like to have it in a different way, but it is as it is, that means that the visibility remain low, remains low. That means. We have to separate probably the forecast for next year or the, the preview. That means on the one hand side, we have the existing business, and there it's really very hard to say, how long does it take to overcome the destocking effects? And how long does it take in different parts of the world, to come back to end consumer moves, where the people are willing to invest into new air purifiers, new, new appliances, and so on. I think this is extremely hard to predict already today. Therefore, there we have a low visibility. On top of that, we have all our growth projects, and there we have better visibility. To the extent that we see that these projects are real, the people are already there, and also the customers are really working on them very hard. The only visibility limitation we have there is about the exact date, the start of production will start, will take place, and also about the seamlessness of the ramp up. Also this will heavily influence the quantitative top line of next year. Therefore, it's now too early to predict it already today. In general, the fundamentals, the new, new projects, they are absolutely concrete, and there we have a good visibility of about. Thank you. Concluding question from him. How much of the revenue in the first half of 2023 was based on products, and all products that began shipping last year, so new products? Yeah, this is always a figure I like also to have, it's not that easy to differentiate. Because, the problem is that there is markets like automotive and medicals, where you have start of production, which is extremely slow. That means you have the time, okay, let's start with a new project, and then in the first year, probably you'll ship not more than 3-4% of that longer term run rate. Then it takes three, four, five, six years even to come to run rate. To give you an example, there is even 1 project in medical and automotive, we are still growing, despite the fact that start of production was over 10 years ago. This can happen, certainly the other can also happen, that you have a kind, more in appliance and consumer, you have an immediate kind of Heaviside function. That means a step function, where you are starting from 1 day to the other, and then it's easy to say. I think this year, the contribution of really new projects, that means projects, they are not yet part of the top line last year, was not that strong in the last couple of months. There are some new projects kicking in, but they are not yet contributing heavily to the top line. There is one exception. This is OEM projects for European OEM in automotive business. This was, to be precise, already started last year, but it was contributing first time significantly on the top line in the first half of the year. This result of actually the 13% growth rate of the automotive business. Perfect. Here comes the next question. Leveraging on that, the question from Mr. Scalari, "If we see a momentum to continue out in H2 for the Tier1 OEM business in automotive?" H2 business? The second half of this year, if the momentum- H2, second half of the year. If this momentum in our Tier 1 business will continue. I'm not that optimistic about the automotive business short term. I think also there, we, we still see some high levels of inventory. We see also there that the automotive business, not our company, but the automotive business downstream, they still benefited from backlogs, heavy backlogs. Our expectation is actually that this backlog comes to an end. That means it, it, it can be one of the scenarios that also automotive come to a kind of a slowdown in the next couple of months. This is my gut feeling. Contradicting to that, I just read two or three or four days ago, an article about the expected numbers of cars to be produced in the next two or three years. This was actually not indicating what I, what is my feeling. Also there, it's hard to say. At the end of the day, I have the feeling in automotive, they are still not fully through the de-stocking. Secondly, the backlog was supporting the sales of, of cars, automotive arrived in the last couple of months. I think that's the only way I can say what the future brings, we will see. Good. Thank you. The next question from Mr. Michael Foeth, probably for you, Matthias. Can you split the increase in SG&A and R&D into an increase in FTEs and wage inflation? The FTEs. Yeah, the FTEs, I think overall, I think we report on the FTEs with a quite foreseeable growth. Here, of course, you have to deduct and take out what we have adjusted with the operators in China, Hungary, when we look, not Hungary, China and Korea, when we look at the FTE counting itself. I think we, for R&D, I think we have increased by at least around 30 FTEs in the first half year of 2023. There is around +10 in, no, more 10 in sales, I would say, and 5-10 in admin also, or supporting functions. Anyway, we can actually indicate with the salary increases, and we are facing or we have faced an inflation situation in Switzerland with slightly more than 3%. Yeah. In the, in the other countries, between 7%-10 US, up to even 20%, 25% in Hungary. On the other hand, you have also an exchange rate change in forint, in the Hungarian forint, compared to Swiss franc, which is also reducing this effect. This is more or less the, the numbers of inflation and also the, the salaries adjustments we have faced at the beginning of the year. Thank you very much. We have one last question from Mr. Andreas von Arx. Concerning the trade-off between medium and long-term growth rate that we indicate between 10%-15% per year, and our targeted EBITDA margin of 17% over cycles. The question is: Is there a lower bound for the EBITDA margin that Sensirion does not want us to cross? The midterm 70% is our guidance. On average, we like actually to be on this level, at least. All on top of that is highly welcome, but this is the, our benchmark. Short term, the fluctuation, again, is should not be limited to both sides, due to short-term reactions which are not from a strategic value. That means, again, if we see, we like to support strategic goals, if they make sense, we do it, despite of even lower EBITDA. On the other hand, and then also this has been seen in the last two years, whenever we have a good run of our top line, we are not going to throw the money out of the window. That means just to reduce the EBITDA in order, and to hire a lot of new people, just in order to limit the EBITDA on the positive side, because it doesn't make sense as well. Whenever you have hire, if you are hiring good R&D, they like also to do something, relevant. It doesn't make sense in both sides. Short term, no, we don't like to do to limit it. Longer term, that will be 17% on average is our benchmark, and we keep that absolutely straight. Very good. Interest in Sensirion