Bossard Holding AG (0QS5) Q4 2024 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Welcome to our annual Financial Analyst and Media Conference 2025. We are streaming this event and will make it available later this afternoon. Stefan Zender, our CFO, and I would like to guide you through the following agenda. I will start with the Business Review 2024. Stefan Zender will then navigate you through the financials. I will continue with some highlights and of our strategy 200 development, namely an update on our strategic services, our ERP system rollouts and our activities around artificial intelligence before I will close with our focus areas for this year. So let me start with the business review 2024. After two years of double digit sales growth in 2021 and 2022 and the single digit contraction in 2023, we faced a decline in sales of 7.7% last year, mainly caused by a global demand normalization. An incredible effort by our employees in all regions, functions and hierarchies looked for growth pockets in sales and cost reduction potential in our operations, namely in the supply chain to secure our gross profit, which increased over the year. The further recessive trends in the second half of 2024 were countered with global cost reduction programs to ensure a decent profitability. All these activities resulted in an EBIT of 100 million Swiss francs and an EBIT margin of 10.2% in a difficult year with lots of geopolitical distortions and economic uncertainties. Part of our growth strategy is mergers and acquisitions, and we concluded three acquisitions in the course of the year. With Deon Fastening in Antwerp in Belgium, we added a manufacturer of a high-quality brand in blind rivet nuts, Tuptara for those who are familiar, and is a distributor of fasteners with a total of 70 employees and 15 million Euro annual sales. Deont strengthens our customer b...