Operator: Results presentation. Please note that the call will be recorded. During today's call, webcast participants will be in a listen-only mode until we conduct the session. If you wish to ask a question, we ask that you please use the raise hand function at the bottom of your Zoom screen. Further instructions will follow at the time of the Q&A. I would now like to turn the call over to Christian Waelti, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Christian Waelti: Thank you, operator, and good afternoon, good evening, everyone. I'm Christian Waelti, Head of Investor Relations, and I'm joined today by Peter Mainz, our CEO, and by Davinder Athwal, our CFO. Today, we will review Landis+Gyr's results for the Q2 and H1 of fiscal year 2026. We will follow the structure of the presentation and conclude with Q&A. Before I hand it over, please take a moment to review the disclaimer on slide 2. Peter, over to you.
Peter Mainz: Thank you, Christian. Good afternoon and good evening, everyone. I'm here with Davinder, our Chief Financial Officer, and we are pleased to provide you with an update on our H1 performance. With that said, let's now start with a review of the strategic developments over the past months. Move to slide 3. We made important strategic progress during the H1. We closed the EMEA divestiture in April and hosted our Capital Markets Day in New York in June, introducing our new segment structure around Connected Platforms and Grid Intelligence, and our midterm targets through fiscal 2028. We also strengthened the leadership team with seasoned executives, Roque Martin for Connected Platforms segment and Eugene Mazo for Grid Intelligence.
Peter Mainz: Our teams continued the preparations toward a potential US listing while retaining the Swiss listing, as we aim to better align our capital markets presence with the majority of our operational business activity. In the H1, we also returned $162 million to shareholders through buyback and dividends. Just this week, we concluded the share buyback ahead of schedule, repurchasing 10% of our share capital over the last 12 months, as promised with the announcement of the EMEA divestment in October 2025. Move on to slide 4. Let's start with the highlight of the week. On Monday, we announced a $509 million contract with a major US investor-owned utility.
Peter Mainz: The timing of large project awards like this is inherently difficult to predict. While we would, of course, have welcomed the order in the H1, what matters most is that we are winning significant business, demonstrating customers' confidence in Landis+Gyr and in particular in our leading grid edge technology. Our order backlog stood at $3.7 billion on 30 September, and as of now surpassed $4.2 billion, reaching another record level. This validates the record pipeline we previously discussed and shows its continued conversion through order intake into backlog. Turning to our H1 performance, net revenue of $501.4 million was in line with our expectations and driven by project transitioning timing as guided earlier in the year in May. Adjusted gross profit was $189.2 million and adjusted gross margin reached a record 37.7%, driven by operating efficiencies.
Peter Mainz: Adjusted EBITDA also grew and was $73.9 million, representing a margin of 14.7%, a significant improvement over previous year. Operating cash flow was $74 million, up 220% year over year, while diluted EPS from continued operations was $1.84, up 263%. With our H1 performance progressing exactly in line with the anticipated revenue profile, we are confirming our midterm revenue guidance for the year, while also narrowing fiscal year 2026 guidance range. In light of our H1 performance and the strength of our order backlog, we are also raising our adjusted EBITDA margin guidance. With that, I will hand it over to Davinder for the financial details. Let's move to slide 5.
Davinder Athwal: Thanks, Peter. Hello, everyone, and thanks for joining us today. In my remarks today, I will be covering order entry and backlog, the results of operations for the Q2 and H1 of fiscal year 2026, as well as liquidity and leverage. Starting with order intake and backlog on slide 5. H1 order intake was $337 million, including $221 million in Connected Platforms and $116 million in Grid Intelligence. Following the September close, we secured a $509 million contract award in October. Including that award, order intake for the year-to-date period was $846 million, or 42% above the H1 fiscal 2026 comparison shown in the presentation. Backlog at 30 September was $3.7 billion, comprising $2.1 billion in Connected Platforms and $1.6 billion in Grid Intelligence. Including the October award, backlog would have been approximately $4.2 billion, or 6% above 30 September 2025.
Davinder Athwal: As Peter mentioned, we continue to see strong pipeline activity, which have reached record levels. Turning to our Q2 results on slide 6. Order intake was $170.3 million, and the trailing 12-month book-to-bill ratio was 0.8 times. Revenue was $269.2 million, down 6% year over year as expected due to deployment timing.
Davinder Athwal: Importantly, profitability continued to improve. Adjusted gross margin reached 38%, up 460 basis points from the prior year quarter, driving adjusted gross profit 6.8% higher despite the decline in revenue. The improvement reflects continued operational efficiencies and a favorable product mix within Connected Platforms. Looking now at our H1 results on slide 7. For H1, revenue was $501.4 million, down 6.3% from $535.3 million in the prior year period. Despite the lower revenue, adjusted gross margin increased 370 basis points to 37.7%, driving adjusted gross profit up 4%. That improvement also carried through to EBITDA. Adjusted EBITDA margin increased 140 basis points to 14.7%, with adjusted EBITDA increasing 3.5% to $73.9 million. While revenue was lower in H1, the underlying profitability of the business improved meaningfully. Looking now at segment performance, and starting with Connected Platforms on slide 8.
Davinder Athwal: Order intake was $220.9 million, with trailing 12 month book-to-bill ratio of 0.6 times. Revenue was $363.7 million, down 9.3%, primarily reflecting the timing of project deployments. At the same time, adjusted gross margin improved significantly, increasing 810 basis points to 36.9%, driven by operational efficiencies and a favorable customer mix. Moving on to slide 9, and Grid Intelligence. Order intake was $116.4 million, with trailing 12 month book-to-bill ratio of 0.8 times. Revenue increased 2.6% to $137.7 million, driven primarily by the growing installed base of Revelo. Annual recurring revenue reached $223 million, representing 8% annualized growth. Adjusted gross margin was 40%, down 600 basis points, primarily reflecting one-time revenue mix effects in Q2. Finally, let's take a look at cash flow, net debt, and leverage on slide 10.
Davinder Athwal: We started the fiscal year with net debt of $198.9 million and leverage of 0.9 times the trailing 12 month adjusted EBITDA. During H1, we generated $74 million of operating cash flow and invested $13.7 million in capital expenditures. We also returned $162.7 million to shareholders, comprising $41.5 million of dividends and $121.2 million of share repurchases. Net proceeds from the EMEA divestment was $97.5 million, while other net changes were $54.3 million. As a result, net debt at 30 September was $258.1 million, with leverage of 1.5 times. As a reminder, the leverage calculation continues to include adjusted EBITDA from divested EMEA business. That concludes my prepared remarks. Thank you again for joining us today and for your continued interest in Landis+Gyr. I'll now hand it back to Peter to take you through our fiscal 2026 guidance and midterm targets.
Peter Mainz: Thank you, Davinder. Let's move on to slide 11. Based on our solid H1 performance, we are narrowing fiscal 2026 net revenue guidance to $1.085 to $1.115 billion, from the previous range of $1.075 to $1.125 billion. The midpoint of the range remains unchanged at $1.1 billion. Supported by the ramp-up of large contracts, we see a significant acceleration in revenue in H2. Based on the continued progress in operating efficiency, we are raising our fiscal 2026 adjusted EBITDA margin guidance to 15% to 16%, from previously 14.5% to 15.5%. Moving to slide 12. As a reminder, our midterm targets through fiscal 2028 remain unchanged, and as presented at the Capital Markets Day back in June. From fiscal 2025 through fiscal 2028, we target a mid-single-digit revenue CAGR and a group gross margin of approximately 35% or higher.
Peter Mainz: We target adjusted EBITDA CAGR at 2x revenue CAGR and adjusted EPS CAGR at more than 5x revenue CAGR. This concludes my prepared remarks, and we are now very happy to answer your questions.
Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin our Q&A session. If you have a question, we ask that you please use the raise hand function at the bottom of your Zoom screen. When it is your turn to ask a question, you will receive a prompt. Please accept, and once called upon, you may unmute and proceed. If you want to withdraw your question, please lower your hand using the raise hand function. Our first question comes from Akash Gupta at J.P. Morgan. Akash, you may now unmute your line and ask your question. Thank you.
Akash Gupta: Yes. Hi, good evening, and thanks for your time. I've got a few, and I'll ask one at a time. My first one is on pipeline for orders and large ones, especially after this, looking this exceptionally large order early in the week. We have still 5 more months to go in current fiscal year. Again, I appreciate these large orders are quite lumpy, but maybe if you have to assign a likelihood or probability, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on how does the pipeline look like, and could we see something more in the remaining course of the year, or you expect more in the next fiscal year?
Peter Mainz: Akash, thank you. Obviously, as we tried to explain, some of those especially large orders are very difficult to predict at what time they come. But we still, no matter what, we really like them. But when you look at the order intake of the $509 million and what we had achieved in the H1.
Peter Mainz: You can assume that we are clearly on the path to have a book-to-bill ratio for the year that is substantially in excess of one. Consistently what I said after the Q1 at the end of July, we continue to look at the record pipeline. What I really liked about this win, it is not just talking about a record pipeline, it is about orders coming out of the record pipeline going into our backlog. So I really look at that as a validation, and the record pipeline that we are looking at is still in place, and there is still a tremendous amount of activity that really validates, I think, the tailwinds that we are finally seeing in our industry.
Akash Gupta: Maybe just to follow up on this order, are you going to book it entirely in Connected Platforms, or it will be split between the two segments as per housekeeping purposes to put that into our numbers?
Peter Mainz: Like every order, it will be split in both segments. This specific one has probably not the percentage ratio of Grid Intelligence as some of the other orders, but it will go in the backlog for both segments.
Akash Gupta: Thank you. My second one is on input cost dynamics. I think it is a bit increasing. You are raising guidance at a time when we hear some concern in the market on input cost and also some potential supply chain bottlenecks, given the big AI investments creating bottleneck for other industries. So maybe if you can talk about what do you see on raw materials, supply chain, and input cost. When we look at this margin upgrade today, where is it coming from, compared to your prior expectation?
Peter Mainz: So obviously a big driver for us when we give guidance for 6 months, all of that is in our backlog. So we have very good visibility on the profitability over the next 6 months. So that is really the driver for increasing our guidance, to be very clear here. Obviously, when you look at our Grid Intelligence product, it is really a product that contains a memory and then contains processing power, and those components have gone up over the past couple of months substantially. And some of those costs in the H2 starts to hit.
Peter Mainz: And like every other industry, we have been working diligently from the month of April, the beginning of our fiscal year, when we understood that this was coming, that we need to continue to work with customers and increase our prices to get compensated for the value increase that is coming from memory chips and coming from processing cost as well.
Akash Gupta: And my last quest-
Peter Mainz: On the availability of- Sorry, just on the avail- Sorry, you also had a point. Sorry for interrupting you. You had a point on the availability of parts and components. I can clearly say that the people in supply chain, they had to work more diligently in providing the supply in the H1. So it did not impact us with any issues in the H1. I expect them to continue to work diligently the H2, but we have really good visibility on what we are executing in the H2 to have that available.
Akash Gupta: Thank you. The last one is just more on the phasing of revenues in H2. Again, if you look at implied H2 revenues, you are guiding for $600 million in H2, which is down 5% year-on-year. Maybe any commentary between Q3 and Q4, the phasing of this revenue. Should we expect Q4 to be more like flattish and Q3 down given the phasing effect, or do you expect similar growth in Q3, Q4? Thank you.
Peter Mainz: I think the pattern you described is actually the pattern we laid out at the very beginning of the year. We said we were transitioning to a contract in Canada. That transitioning is starting in this quarter, Q3, and in Q4, it will ramp up to a full deployment scale. What you have laid out is very consistent how we depicted the revenue profile throughout the year. Obviously also, Q3 is always the shortest quarter in any given year. But that profile matches with what we laid out with our expectations.
Akash Gupta: You mean similar 5% decline in Q3, Q4 revenues?
Peter Mainz: Sorry. You depicted two different profile. I am referring to the first one.
Akash Gupta: Okay. Thank you.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Patrick Rafaisz at UBS. You may now unmute your line and ask your question. Thank you.
Patrick Rafaisz: Thanks, and hi, everybody. Two or three questions from me as well. The first one would be a follow-up specifically to the Connected Platforms and the strong margin performance there. You talked about operating efficiency and mix. I assume mix means more in the revenue. Can you maybe elaborate a bit and also give more color on these individual components, how much they contributed?
Peter Mainz: A couple of things. On the price increases hitting the H1 results, price increases being on the components in the H1, that included very little of that. As I said, it is really starting to hit our P&L and hit our cost base in actually this quarter, beginning this quarter, middle of this quarter, and then in the Q4. That is what we see on the material cost side. On the mix side, I would probably say, as we articulated on the Revelo, as you alluded, we are clearly going down the learning curve as this product was early on in the cost curve. We continue to go down this cost curve dramatically and perhaps a bit faster than we had anticipated. It is an electronic product.
Peter Mainz: Volume is the name of the game, and as it continues to replace other products, that continues to show also consistent on how we have anticipated it, so that it continues to be a big driver for us. A new product early on in the cost down curve, and we continue to execute on that cost curve, and perhaps a bit faster than we anticipated at the beginning of the year.
Patrick Rafaisz: Okay, great. Then the same question for Grid Intelligence. You mentioned here, I think, Davinder, you mentioned the one-time mix effect here that impacted the adjusted gross profit margin. Can you explain that as well, please?
Eugene Mazo: Hey, Patrick. I will take it from you. Yeah, essentially, I would think about it like this, Patrick. So this is an anomalous quarter where we just happen to have a mix that is not representative of our typical business profile in that segment. So we saw that in this quarter, but we expect that to kind of normalize over the balance of the year.
Patrick Rafaisz: Okay. So really an isolated quarterly.
Eugene Mazo: Yeah.
Patrick Rafaisz: Okay.
Eugene Mazo: It is an anomaly. Exactly.
Peter Mainz: Yeah. In our Capital Markets Day, we laid out a 50% gross margin goal for that segment, and we continue to remain on the journey to the 50% margin over the three-
Eugene Mazo: Over the three-year period. Correct. Mm-hmm.
Patrick Rafaisz: Okay, good. The third one would be when you talked about strategic progress, you also mentioned the US listing. Can you update us maybe on what you think about the timeline here for going live?
Peter Mainz: I'd prefer to stay away from a timeline. As you know, you always need a market that is opportune to continue to do that it's in best interest of every shareholder. But the preparation is progressing well, and I'd stay focused on progressing on the preparation for a listing in the US.
Patrick Rafaisz: Okay. Good. Understood. I'll just slip in a last one. I realize with the large order win, you're ahead of last year, and you already said book-to-bill will be well above one. Still wondering on the strong decline year-on-year in orders. Is there anything we have to read into on the base business or the recurring business, or is that also just quarterly volatility?
Peter Mainz: There is a bit volatility, again, in a very short quarter. Those couple of hundred million dollar deals that can impact it one way or the other. Three weeks after close of the month, the picture looks completely different. That is a bit the nature of the business. This is great news regardless if it's three weeks earlier or three weeks later. This is just quite great news. We like it. That's the volatility we are used to, if you want to call it volatility. That's why we look at order intake on a longer period of time than a quarter. There's nothing but good news in that one.
Patrick Rafaisz: Okay, understood. I'll go back into the line. Thanks.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Sean Milligan at Needham & Co. Sean, you may now unmute your line and ask your question. Thank you.
Sean Milligan: Hi. Thanks for taking the questions. First, I wanted to focus on the gas meter side. I would like to get your perspective on where ultrasonic gas meter penetration stands today, and how you see that market evolving over the next one to two years for you.
Peter Mainz: Sean, thank you for the question. Gas is for us an excellent opportunity that we have entered a couple of years ago, also with our ultrasonic gas meter offering. As a reminder, nobody has sold more ultrasonic gas meters than we have, and we have done that predominantly in Europe, but we transitioned that offering now over to the US. We had already served gas utilities, in particular in the shape of combination utilities. Electric and gas is a very common one. A lot of those utilities have a communications umbrella that is provided by Landis+Gyr across electric and gas. We are quite excited that we can also now fit the leading ultrasonic gas portfolio under our network and also provide a solution to other gas utilities.
Peter Mainz: Gas, as I said, two years ago, it was perceived as a transitory energy resource, and now it is really a destination energy resource, and we have seen a resurgence in investment in gas and also on the gas side. We quite like where we are positioned, and certainly from our starting point, we are quite excited where we can go in the gas business in North America. As a reminder, in some of the APAC regions where we participate, we are already and continue to be a leading player in gas there already today.
Sean Milligan: Okay. Thank you, Peter. On the Grid Intelligence side, as you continue scaling the connected device base, how should investors think about recurring revenue software per endpoint? Is that a good metric to use? Is that increasing? Is that going to increase over the next couple of years, or is it more about just growing the number of connected endpoints for you to drive Grid Intelligence higher?
Peter Mainz: So it's a combination of the both. Obviously, that's why we are running so fast to get Revelo into the ground, because they're the basic foundation of the growth for Grid Intelligence. But then obviously once that platform is in the ground, we also want to increase the value per endpoint. In particular, if you think about the duration of our contracts, 10, 15 years, if we have the platform in place, that should be the second lever. Platform in place, deploy Grid Intelligence, and then grow also the value per endpoint around Grid Intelligence.
Sean Milligan: But we're still relatively early in the Grid Intelligence revenue opportunity per endpoint. Is that the right way to think about it? Like it's still very early innings in that regard?
Peter Mainz: I think we make very nice revenue on the number of endpoints that we have deployed already today. I think we have well in excess. When I just stay with the Revelo product, we have well in excess of 5 million of those deployed and delivering value today. That carries a substantial amount of Grid Intelligence annual recurring revenue as we speak. So I would say a big driver for that, to see it in our numbers, is still converting the 50 million, or sorry, 50 million units of Revelo, continue to swiftly deploy them, and continue from the pipeline, fill our backlog, and get that out. So I think over the next couple of years, that will be the main growth driver that is visible, and then we'll also start to see how the value per endpoint continues to grow around Grid Intelligence as well.
Sean Milligan: Okay. That's very helpful. Thank you.
Operator: This concludes
Peter Mainz: Thank you, Sean.
Operator: the Q&A session. I would now like to hand back to management for closing remarks.
Peter Mainz: Thank you again for joining us today. Very much appreciate the time and the interest in Landis+Gyr. Look forward to meeting all of you soon, either virtually or in person. Goodbye, and have a great day. Thank you.
Operator: This concludes today's call. Thank you everyone for joining. You may now disconnect.
