My name is Bettina Schäfer. I am from the Investor Relations team at LPKF, and your host today for this call. Daniel Tolle is still on parental leave. The presentation for this call is available on our Investor Relations website in the section Publications, Financial Reports, and Presentations. For the first part of this call, participants have been placed on a listen-only mode. Afterwards, there will be a Q&A session. The conference will be recorded and published for a period of two weeks on our website. Klaus Fiedler, CEO, and Christian Witt, CFO, will now give you an overview of our business development in the first six months and a look ahead. Before we start, I would like to point out that any forward-looking statements in today's presentation are based on information currently available. These forward-looking statements are not to be understood as guarantees of future performances and results. Ladies and gentlemen, I now hand over to Klaus Fiedler. Please go ahead, Klaus. Thank you very much Bettina. Welcome, everybody to our conference call for the H1 year for LPKF. I'm gonna get started with introducing you to the main business development, the main market developments, and our operations, then handing over to Christian to give you more insights into the financial results. Bettina, if you could please switch to the slide. Here we have it, business development. What do we currently see in our markets? Let's start with solar. In solar, I guess that won't surprise anyone, we continue to see a strong demand, a strong growth, and especially also in new technologies like Perovskites in thin-film solar cells, where we have already established ourselves now, both in Asia and in the U.S. in the markets. In the electronics industry, we see a more heterogeneous picture. We see that the reshoring trend into Eastern Europe, into North America, is definitely visible also in our numbers and in the demand. While in Asia, we see more caution at the moment, and countersteer that with focusing on our high-end products, which offer such a clear differentiation and customer benefit that we can also place them in the Asian markets. Looking at laser welding, we see a stable market, but not a bullish market in automotive and consumer at the moment. We see strategically a good growth and tangible deals in the e-mobility field, which help us to balance the picture and stay on our path according to plan. Picture for rapid prototyping, also stable, but we see that institutional buyer demand remains strong. We see more caution at the moment in the private industry, which is not surprising given the overall economic situation at the moment. In general, a stable picture that is on track, and I will come to that more in our business development. We continue to see very receptive demand from our customers in the new strategic growth fields of display, semiconductor, and biotechnology. Let's come to business development. What's going on in that area? Perovskites in solar, as already mentioned, coming with more tangible demand and faster than we anticipated more than a year ago, which is good, because we prepared for that. We are established already, as mentioned, in Asia and the U.S. with tangible deals we made, and of course, we continue to work with our customers here, especially preparing for 2024 and beyond. In solar for 2023, all orders are in the books, and it's all about execution. In electronics, I'm especially happy that in depaneling, our new technologies that we already brought on the market, and continue to bring on the market, like our Tensor technology and the automation that we now offer, really now brings the deals we anticipated, and that's a clear growth driver for electronics. That's a clearly positive sign, but we continue to work on our product pipeline. We continue to bring out the new high-end solutions here. As mentioned, in welding, e-mobility, battery solutions, there we see really good market traction, and that's important, because that's a growth field we anticipated and prepared for, and that helps us to compensate, at the moment, more cautious markets like consumer and classic automotive. In business development for our display strategic growth fields, we are on track. We have been visiting our key customer here, we see now increased visibility on the market introduction on lead products that are identified. We see that we can anticipate now to have tangible deals starting in 2024 and strongly growing in 2025, which is good. Of course, we first need to finish all the technical work, which is more now on the customer side than on our side. We are delivering as we committed. All of this results in a really good order intake in all segments, a record-high order backlog of more than EUR 81 million that we currently have, which means our focus, and that's Christian, and me, and the whole organization, is on execution, is on getting the product produced and delivered within this year to stay on our growth plan here. Looking at operations and supply chain, of course the global economic situation is still volatile and with a lot of uncertainty, so that is something we continuously monitor here. We still have no direct effects from the Ukraine war, so that is something we continue to monitor, but we don't see, and also don't expect, any changes to our plan due to that. We see the continuing relocation of production from Asia to Europe to North America, from which we benefit, but of course, not losing the focus on the Asian opportunity here. We see some improvement in the global supply chains. It is easier than 12 months ago to get key parts that we need for delivering our products, but it is still affecting our operations, and it still requires a high amount of attention and resources here. We, like others, also suffer from staffing shortages in several areas. It's regional, and we can counter steer, but it's also something we continuously need to counteract on and monitor, because that's, of course, a key impact factor on operational execution, which is the focus to make our numbers. From the demand and market side, we seem to be on the right track. The numbers show it, and we want to stay on that track. With that, I want to hand over to Christian to walk you through more details on the financials. Thanks Klaus. Welcome everybody, also from my side. Let's go a little bit into the numbers and into the background of the numbers. Next slide please. Altogether, we're on track where we wanted to be. Revenue is within our guidance, slightly above midpoint, comparing to past year, we also should consider that about EUR 8 million were pushed out directly over year-end due to customer push-outs. When we look at gross margin, there's two aspects which are important. One is pricing and material cost. That's both on track in Q2. We have a slightly negative FX impact from dollar and renminbi, but that's a couple of hundred thousand euros. That exists, but it's not, it's not moving the needle too much. We also had a negative product mix effect in the Q1. We are fully on track in Q2 with our product mix, with our margins also within the solar field and in the other business units. Looking at EBIT, in the end, follows sales as expected, and includes investment in our new technologies, especially into ARRALYZE. When we look at our cash situation, we have a better cash flow situation, despite the lower profits, due to our improved working capital. We'll get to that a little bit later. Order situation, as Klaus pointed out, is quite good, it has a number of aspects. Order intake is up 38%. That's good. That's a good number. If you look at Q2, we still have a book-to-bill close to one. We have all segments with a decent order intake. When we look at the order book, we have another very positive sign. We've got EUR 55 million in there for the current year. We have another EUR 27 million in there for the following years. That's quite strong. If you compare that one with the mid of 2022, we only had about EUR 10 million in there for the following years. When you take that difference, part of it is our semiconductor project. The other part is solar, as well as other business units, like welding. We have quite a number of projects where we've already been able to fill the pipeline for the ongoing years. Next slide please. Let's look a little bit more detail into the business units. When we look at electronics, we see, as Klaus mentioned, that the higher sales in depaneling mostly compensate for shortcomings in other product segments, among others, those which we will discontinue in the near future. I think we've talked about that. It's not big ones, but it's smaller segments or sub-segments where we see very little revenue, and we shouldn't put any more effort into that, and should focus on the scalable and most interesting segments for the future. As I said, as Klaus mentioned already, where we did that was in depaneling with our Tensor Technology, and these orders are coming basically from the fact that we managed to enter new market segments with the Tensor Technology in our depaneling business, huh? When we look at the EBIT, we are continuing with selective structural measures to reduce fixed costs. We have slightly higher depreciation than in the past because some of the new products, including automation, Tensor and others, are getting into the depreciation phase. Looking at developments, we have a good demand on the prototyping side. Good solid demand, especially when you consider that in the 2022 numbers, we had about EUR 1.5 million in there, which were pushed out from the previous year. That is a slight growth, as we also had expected, huh. Slightly negative FX impact is a bit more pronounced in the development than in the others, as development has a higher share of sales in the U.S. and in China than the other business units. Looking at welding, gross margins fine and stable, despite some slightly negative FX impact. We have a couple of smaller negative impacts, some higher fixed costs, some slightly lower capitalization of R&D, which lead us to a slightly lower EBIT. That is the facts which we expect to compensate on the sales side in the H2 of the year. Looking at solar is quite interesting and has a number of discrete effects in there. On the one hand, we've had a difficult Q1. Difficult Q1 on the EBIT side, because we had to account for some additional costs for our operational issues. We also had a higher number of traded laser components, which lowered the gross margin. In Q2, we are fully on track there. We are on track with our gross margins. We are on track with profitability, that is working quite well. On the revenues, again, H1 year included a bit more than EUR 6 million as a direct push-out from 2021. That also kind of explains the differences in here. That's the look at the different segments and in terms of profitability and revenue. Let's go to look at cash and cash flow on the next page. Key for our cash flow development is net working capital management. As you can see here, we have a very significantly lower working capital than we had 12 months ago. Let me just highlight two aspects. Number one, when you look at the stock figures, we have about EUR 4 million, which we have built up just in Q2, so Q1, Q2 versus Q1 numbers, in order to stock up work in progress, as well as raw materials, to produce all the stuff we will sell and deliver there in the next six months. Running production as well as products we need for other stuff to deliver even into January 2024. That is conscious. That's not an issue. That's the same pattern as we always have in solar, it depends on the delivery schedule for the customer. When you look at the rest of our net working capital, we are quite happy with the progress of our reduction projects. On the one hand, we have stock reduction, where we basically take stock back to and beyond levels where we've had it in the past, in development and electronics, and also on welding. That works well. As the supply situation gets better step by step, we can reduce our stock, and we do so. Our DSO is improving continuously. We've had a couple of measures in our project there as well, and our advanced payments improved significantly as well, partially due to the payment terms agreed, partially also due to the higher order backlog, which we have in long-term projects, where we receive advanced payments from our customers who finance our operations. Mid-term targets, I'm not sure if we will reach it by the end of this year or rather next year, about 10% - 15% of our annual sales. That should be the range of our working capital. We've been there, and I'm very confident that we are getting back, looking at the measures and the progress we've made so far. Altogether, we have a slightly better net cash position, as we should have. With that, I would hand back to Bettina, happy to take- sorry, guidance first. Sorry. Guidance, Q3 and full year guidance. Q3 guidance, we have a revenue guidance of EUR 28 million-EUR 33 million, with an EBIT of EUR -1 million-EUR 3 million. And for the full year, we have taken down the upper end of our revenue guidance by EUR 5 million, because we see that the already disclosed risks on operational issues and solar deliveries in Q4 to some degree materialize. When we see that it happens, we will reflect it in our guidance. Full year guidance is EUR 125 million-EUR 135 million for revenue, and our EBIT margin guidance remains unchanged. We are working very well on our cost position, and looks good in terms of effects we are going to see this year, and which will partially also help us next year, of course. We can leave our EBIT margin guidance here unchanged. Business aspiration, as communicated in the past, continuing to grow our core business with high single-digit numbers, huh, For our new technologies, LIDE and ARRALYZE in the market fields for, of display, semiconductor, and biotechnology we expect, and aim for low triple-digit million euros in revenue. All of that together with our operating leverage, bring us to an attractive double-digit EBIT margin. With that, in the end, thanks very much for your attention, and I'll hand back to Bettina for Q&A. Ladies and gentlemen we are ready for your questions. Please click on the hand signal if you want to ask a question, and please click on the hand signal again in case you want to withdraw it. I can already see two hands up here from Johannes, and I have unmuted you, so you should be able to speak. Johannes? I have to unmute myself, n ow it works now. Hello. Yes, it does. Hello, Mr. Good morning, everyone. Maybe this is our most expected question. Can you give us more insight a little bit about first, this LIDE deal you have made with these large customers in the display space, which is it maybe in the direction you had expected first, and does such deals support your expectations in the midterm of, yes, low three, triple-digit revenue contribution? What about maybe the semiconductor part and the other parts of the LIDE technology? How is this developing? What could we expect here for 2024 and 2025? Happy to take your questions here. Let's start with the last part of the question. As you know, we made a significant deal with a large OEM in Q1 in the semiconductor space. There, the execution, the operational preparation, and so on is running. Of course, we have more deals that we are eyeing and are preparing for. Technical evaluations are running, so we are working on expanding that, but always having in mind we need to deliver, and what we put on our plate with the first deal needs to be executed. Situation in semiconductor for me, on track. We are where we should be. Again, you are asking me difficult questions, and I'm under confidentiality. Let me see what light I can shed on the display area. As you well know, we have a joint development agreement with a sizable display customer, working on various projects with them, and we have been, as was planned in the JDA, in the past quarters in an R&D phase. This R&D yields results, and we are now in the phase that tangible products, where the technology should be implemented, become visible, and we are working towards a clear target here. Our goal is that we get out of this R&D phase and into a clear development phase, which then has a clear line of sight to operational implementation within this year. During our visit to the customer, this transparency was now strongly increased, which is exactly how it always happens in these projects. No surprises, and we need to stay the course to then have a clear line of sight regarding timing, volumes, and so on. All of this gives me the high confidence we are on track and will then also reap the contributions to our strategic ambitions. The work goes on, and we need to stay the course here to make sure the technology is really ready for volume adaptation, and that is something we do as a team together with the customer. As mentioned, I see the main remaining tasks more on the customer side and less on our side, but that doesn't change the picture. Together as a team, we need to have all the check marks to now it can go into volume. This is an exclusive development on the display side with this one customer, or are you also in discussions with other customers, maybe for different solutions? For different solutions, we are in discussions with other customers. The rest of the agreement is under confidentiality, and if I tell you that now and the customer learns, I won't have a deal anymore, so I won't say no more. Okay. Maybe on ARRALYZE and your foundry business, I heard a little bit out of the market, ARRALYZE is developing like planned or even better, and the foundry is a little bit lacking. Is that right, or is it the wrong information I got? For the foundry, I think we could do more, and we should do more, and we are working on that. As you already have seen, we are increasing our marketing here, and you can expect a lot more here in the coming quarters, because it's a very fragmented business, and you need to be present. All in all, for the foundry, yes, I would not be unhappy if we would do a little bit more here, so let's work on it. For ARRALYZE, our market entry and what we are doing, maybe you read the press release, we now have a representation in Boston, which is a hotspot Yeah For the biotechnology field. That's running well. What we're currently very busy with is we got all our beta customer feedback and so on, and as expected, we are new to this market. We learn certain things. The customer needs X, Y, Z in the product. Our engineering team is highly busy at the moment getting all of that into the product. That takes a couple months longer than I would have hoped, but okay, that's part of the deal. That's what we are working on. That's what we need to catch up on. In the big picture, enter the market this year with some first deals, prepare for strong growth, nothing has changed. Great, the feedback. Maybe I can add- Is quite positive, yeah. Yeah, please go on. Mm-hmm. Christian, go ahead. Yeah. Well, continue with our lives. I've got one more comment on the foundry. Yeah, please. Feedback is positive. Yes, that's right, Johannes. One more comment on the foundry. There's one specific measure we've also taken in order to increase our foundry revenues. We have included more processes, more post-processes in our foundry offering, and we see that this is very interesting for customers. That is not something unexpected. Mm Now doing it, we see interest, and that type of interest typically also leads to step-by-step growing business, huh? There are some measures behind it. Super, thanks. Coming back to semiconductors, there's a lot of discussions about advanced packaging, even driven by generative artificial intelligence. As the part where you are in with LIDE and even with your other semiconductor offerings, is maybe the growing part, huh, in a maybe, a little bit weaker equipment market. TSMC will double its capacity in advanced packaging. Is that maybe something you could benefit, too, with your offering? That's something we clearly see. We see the interest in advanced packaging heating up very strongly. We also see that specifically in Asia, I won't say more details. Mm-hmm With very high interest into our equipment. Part of that we will still realize this year, which is nice. We think we are well-positioned at all the players in the advanced packaging field. Yeah. We are closely linked, so we see what they need in their roadmaps, and this is what we specifically address together with them as a team in joint developments, in technologies that we bring in. All in all, I see it heating up, but we are diligently working to get into the volume. Where we are at the moment is still portfolio business, but nicely contributing portfolio business. Great. like in displays, semiconductors, should bring a higher contribution in 2024 and 2025 from today's. That's correct. [crosstalk] The strategic direction stays totally unchanged. We have a core business. Mm-hmm Which we modernize continuously to always be the one with the best value offering to the customer. This has the ambition of high single-digit growth. All in all, we see that. Nice. And let's say, non-organic growth is from the three areas, semiconductor, display, biotech. In all of them, I see we are on track. It's not something where we push the button and, boom, we have double revenue. No, we have to put in all the work and the teaming up with customers. That's what we do. Great. Final, more, yeah, basic question on this, EBIT. Maybe a question regarding pricing. You mentioned some input costs had increased. Mm-hmm Pressure is therefore on your margin. Can you also pass on with some time lapses to your customers? Yes. Clear answer, yes. As in the past, no. Yes, now is not the time to do the price increases. The time to do the price increases was when there was the peak of the demand, on the demand side and short side of components, and so forth, and that's what we did. I think in 2022, nearly all of what we did is now effective. I think with Q2, even the last increases we did are fully effective, huh? Mm-hmm. Okay. That's. [crosstalk] Johannes, that's why the margins. Yeah That's why the margins are fine, huh? We have a slight increase in material price. We have an increase in the customer price, and that's what it should be like, huh? Okay, okay, thanks a lot. No further questions. Thank you very much. Thank you. The next question comes from Adrian Pehl from Stifel. Mr. Pehl, you can go ahead with your question. Hi, everybody. Good morning, I hope you can hear me. Yes. Yeah. All good. Perfect. Maybe a bit of a housekeeping question first on the welding segment. Obviously, you had a pretty soft Q1, now much improved Q2. How should we see that? Was that some revenue shifting from Q1 finally into Q2, the run rate is, let's say, a little bit lower, what we saw in the Q2? Or is the EUR 6.6 million revenues you did a good proxy for the next couple of quarters or actually even growing? Maybe you could elaborate a little bit on this one. Also, one additional housekeeping question on LIDE. Should we assume that you have been able to sell a tool in the Q2, or will we see some shipments rather also in the H2 of 2023? Okay. That could be. We did sales all, of course, also in the H1 for LIDE, but we don't break down that number for confidentiality reasons. You know, it's a hot market. On welding, what we did see, and which is a big chunk of the rather slow Q1, and also Q2 could be higher from a pure demand market side. What we really see is that projects take significantly longer than we expect due to our customers having certain parts not available, which we need to basically do the factory releases, and therefore also the sales of the products. That is something we saw quite regularly now. "We need these parts to just validate the machine is doing what it should. Sorry, we cannot get deliveries in time. It's two months longer. That is something that puts a bit of, you know, a brake on the timing of deals at the moment. From order intake and what we see as new and also strategic deals, well, it happened in July, so it's not Q2, but we see absolutely that this is picking up as we expected. Again, execution operations, not only us, but our customer having his stuff ready in time as planned, that is something that explains a good chunk of the slowness you just were mentioning. I hope that answers your question. Adrian, if you just take the numbers, we are usually H2-heavy in welding by type of seasonality, same thing as this year. Yeah? All right. Very good. Then, We both wish we could fix that, but being H2 heavy is part of the game here. Yeah. Boy, would I wish- I had it more evenly distributed. We have to live with that, but it is as it is, obviously. Another question, please, on CapEx. I mean, obviously, you're not the most CapEx-heavy company in the world. Adrian? Adrian? we can't hear you. Okay. I'm sorry. Oh, now it's better. Now it's back. [crosstalk] few seconds. I'm back. Okay, maybe. Just repeat your last sentence. CapEx question. Connection was lost. Yeah. On CapEx, yeah, exactly. What should we assume basically for the current fiscal year, particularly on the side of tangible assets? Is there anything that we should factor in going forward? I mean, maybe it's a little bit depending also on the foundry expansion, but would like to hear a couple of thoughts from you. That would be fine. Thank you. There's only one, it's regular, smaller investments, which we'll be continuing to do, replacement, maintenance, more or less. There is one item where we will have a couple of hundred thousand in this year, and that is CapEx which we need for our semiconductor project, which. Mm-hmm Klaus mentioned before. There we'll see couple of hundred thousand this year. Huh? Low CapEx, as before. All right. There's no need actually for next year, in that sense? I mean, obviously, also related to the running project that you've just mentioned, but nothing in particular? Remains low CapEx. Yeah. Remains low CapEx. Yeah. That's the only thing which is worth mentioning. The rest isn't even worth mentioning. It's replacing servers and PCs. Yeah Here and there, small stuff. It's nothing large, which would be seven digit. Yeah, that's the only one which we have, which is large, huh? Got it. Maybe a little bit more high-level question? Lastly, I mean, Johannes has asked quite a bit already about the semi arena. On, let's say, a non, semi clients, a bit more consumer, industrial, et cetera, is there any change that you realized in wording, body language, whatever, in the sense of, what do they signal in terms of demand? Is there any incremental change from last time we spoke or from the last quarter? For the high-end new technologies that we offer, no. This is something they absolutely need for their future. They also shout that into the world, in conferences and so on. They are n o. They stay the course, even when times are tough. For more legacy products, established markets, you were mentioning consumer and so on, yes. We see that, of course the global economy at the moment is not in its best shape. This was expected in our planning and is compensated by new markets, new technologies that we offer. Yes, we see there people being much more cautious. This is not a surprise. This is part of our planning. Mm. Let me be a bit more explicit because I think that's one key question which the financial community has with all companies, especially equipment companies at the moment. You look at our end markets and the relevance of the end markets for our current business, yeah, not the new tech stuff. The new tech stuff is unchanged, as Klaus said. The electronics market, especially the Asian-China electronics market, is a market where we have a very low share. Huh? We basically don't sell lots of material due to Chinese EMS for mass production. Is done by Chinese companies, China for China. Mm. That's a difficult segment at the moment, but it's not the segment we are really in. What we sell in China as equipment is frequently to Western, not all, but frequently to Western companies operating in China. Huh? Frequently also to other segments, huh? That's number one, looking at electronics. When we look at electronics for the Western world, we see the reshoring, which Klaus described. That is a quite positive impact we see, and we see stronger business there than we saw a couple of years ago. We have the right product offering. We offer automation, and we offer our Tensor Technology in the electronic segment, which brings us forward and which helps us grow there. That's quite positive, huh? The only solar is running anyway, without further comments. The only two elements where we see the current cycle with a slight impact is a small subsegment of the development area with the U.S. private customers. That is less than 10% of our development segment. There we see an impact that people hit the brakes. In the other areas of development, of rapid prototyping, we can compensate that, because we have higher demands from universities and so forth, huh? The second small area is a small part of the welding automotive area. We don't see people hitting the brakes, but we don't see them ordering as much as they should do, given the investment brakes they had in the past, huh? That is the only two, and the others we see quite positive, and that is basically why we have a decent order intake and why we also give you a decent outlook, how business is going. Because in these areas which we mentioned, we are growing, and we have a good demand, huh? I think that's, that was a bit more elaborated, but as I think that's an important question for everyone in the market at the moment, you should know where we stand and where we are affected by a potential downturn in certain industries. Got it. Thank you. Any further questions from you Mr. Pehl, or? No, I'm fine for the moment. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Any further questions from anyone else? I can't see any hand signals at the moment, but please raise your hand, and you can ask questions. It looks like most of, here we've got. Oh, Johannes again. Johannes. Yeah. Mr. Ries. You should be able to speak, Mr. Ries. Now you can hear me again? Yes. Maybe only a follow-on question on your technology of Tensor. How broad use this technology can be used from your customers? How much is a standalone product? Only to understand what is the potential going forward. Okay. Tensor basically means, you want to, let's say, cut through a circuit board. At a certain point, if you increase the laser power, you burn through it, so you cannot use it anymore for a clean cut. A Tensor is a technology to steer the laser beam in a very smart and differentiated way, that you can still increase the power and therefore the cutting speed. Mm-hmm While not damaging the material. This is what we implement step by step into our product portfolio for all kinds of sizes, laser wavelengths, and so on and so forth. That is something which is really easy to pitch to the customer. Mm-hmm. Look, here's a machine. You have 40% higher throughput. That's money in his pocket, and that's why we think that was really a technology. This is what LPKF should do. This is how we differentiate in the market, and that's why we see that we can now grab. We already have a very high share, but we can now address markets that are more cost sensitive because now we have basically the TCO at a much better position against competing technologies. Great. Thanks for this clarification. I still can't see any further hands at the moment. Are there any further questions? This doesn't seem to be the case, I would like to thank you all very much for joining this call. Our next regular conference call will take place on the 26th of October, when we release our nine- month figures. Thank you very much, goodbye.