Bossard Holding AG (0QS5) Q2 2024 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Welcome to BossArt and the presentation of our semi-annual results 2024. For today, we have four points on the agenda. First, I'd like to provide you some highlights of the first half year 2024. Then Stefan Zender, our CFO, will guide you through the financial review. I will then provide some progress report on our strategy 200 before I will try to close with a focus on outlook 2024. So to the highlights for the first half of 2024. We started with a satisfactory result in a very challenging environment, particularly the first quarter was still coming out of recession year 2023, very demanding, whereas the second quarter showed some light signs of recovery, yet not true signs of recovery, keeping in mind that PMIs that you're probably all aware of, so still in a recessive phase, so we're happy with satisfactory H1 result. We have seen new opportunities in customers, particularly in the electronics, semi-con and aerospace sectors, industry, so we see some light at the end of the tunnel there. Particularly in the semiconductor industry, we see markets like India with their Make in India approach are showing nice signs of growth. Then our cross-profit margins were on a satisfactory level, actually higher than last year. And we also benefited from a lower cost base, which we initiated at the end of last year to help us supporting our profitability. We successfully introduced our new ERP system, Boost, in France and South Africa in April. As you are probably aware, this is our new digital platform with two new rollouts. So we made another milestone, we reached another milestone Finally, last but not least, we acquired the company Dayot Fastening in Belgium. And a bit more on this acquisition. Dayot Fastening in Belgium is a manufacturer of so-called blind rivet nuts. If yo...