OC Oerlikon Corporation AG (0QO3) Q2 2024 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Erlikon's Q2 results call. With me in the call, I have Philipp Müller, CFO of Erlikon. Philipp will start the call with a presentation providing an update on our end markets, financials, and outlook. We will then follow up with Q&A. With that, I would like to open our presentation and hand over to Philipp. The floor is yours. Thank you, Stephan. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our second quarter results presentation. We continue to execute on our strategic priorities of driving efficiency and innovation. We achieved robust orders and strong profitability in a difficult economic environment as industrial production and consumer spending continue to be subdued. Following a strong start to the year, we will raise our full year margin guidance. In addition, we are driving forward our pure play strategy and we're fully on track with our plans. I will start the presentation with an overview of the group results, followed by an update on our end markets, the divisional results, and we'll conclude with our outlook. At the group level, orders increased 1% year over year at constant FX to 651 million Swiss francs. Q2 represents the second quarter where we see a sequential improvement in our polymer processing solutions orders after a prior period of five quarters where we saw our customers delaying their investment decisions. Group sales decreased 10 percent at constant effects to 616 million Swiss francs. This was driven by lower filament orders in the second half of 2023 and was in line with our expectations. Surface Solutions achieved higher organic sales year over year, despite soft PMIs. Operational EBITDA margin was 16.3% in Q2, slightly lower than last year. In the context of reported sales being down 12% and the...