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Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the AT&S conference call on the results for the fiscal year 2019/2020. [Operator Instructions] Let me now turn the floor over to Ms. Gerda Königstorfer.
Welcome also from our side to the conference call of AT&S about the financial year 2019/2020.
We will give you today an overview about the global market environment, about the financials, of course also about the strategic development. And finally, about the outlook for the year 2020/'21.
The conference call will be held today by Andreas Gerstenmayer. And now I want to hand over to Andreas Gerstenmayer. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Ms. Königstorfer. Also a warm welcome from my side to our annual report about the last fiscal year.
Let me briefly say some details about our setting today as you have most likely read from our latest announcements. Unfortunately, Ms. Stoisser is not a member of the management board of AT&S anymore due to health reasons.
Today, we decided for my support, and if there are any more detailed question to let participate, our Director Finance, Mr. Silvo Leitner; and our Director Global Controlling, Mr. Karim Beglari. They will also participate in the meeting today. And if there are any questions I cannot directly answer, they will definitely be able to follow up on that.
We have set the presentation to give you a brief overview about the developments throughout the last fiscal year, definitely also about the results we have achieved, but also focusing on the outlook and the forward-looking view about the business and how the entire environment in our view will develop over the next period of time.
So starting with Slide 1, it's giving an overview about the global market development. It's more a review about the last fiscal year. As we have already been communicating in the half year's results, we had already, after two quarters, some significant impact from the global trade frictions, which a little bit is now reduced. But unfortunately, in the last quarter, we had this COVID-19 issue coming up. All this is causing quite some uncertainties in the market. The consumer sentiment is quite unsure, and the whole market is very volatile and also, visibility in the entire market ecosystem is quite low.
What we have seen also is a very, very nice development in our IC substrate business. This is mainly driven by the growth of data, generated data, out of communication, probably where COVID helped a little bit also. And there also for the future, we see significant demand for processor modules in the high-performance area.
We have also seen the situation in the automotive business, which was already quite volatile over the last couple of quarters. Especially in the beginning of the calendar year 2020, the pressure has increased and COVID did its utmost to reduce the demand side. Nevertheless, we will cover the data later. Each of this did not so bad in the last fiscal year in this area.
The industrial investment activities for industrial equipment, automation equipment, things like that, is still on a quite low level. This was already the case over the complete last fiscal year, and it's not getting better due to COVID. And market -- medical markets is quite stable, and especially with the more sensitivity for health applications and health treatment. We expect that this will be supported.
Moving on to Slide 2, about AT&S and the main topics and development in the fiscal year '19/'20. Finally, we can state that so far we have an excellent crisis management that mitigated the impact on the revenue, as you have seen from our press release. Revenue is quite on a stable base. Nevertheless, all these changes, all these impacts from the ecosystem showed lower demand and unfavorable product mix, especially in the mobile device segment, which impacted our profitability.
We have a very strong IC substrate business growing continuously and utilizing all our capacity we have available. The automotive segment last fiscal year still was on a stable performance, especially in terms of revenues.
In terms of profitability, there were some concessions we had to make.
Industrial segment was still on a lower level and most likely will continue on that for a couple of quarters now. So in total, the market environment in industrial and automotive segment is low -- is showing lower demand. And also, that is causing more competition, and also increasing at least temporary the price pressure. And as I said before, also in AT&S, medical and health care continued with the positive development and positive trends.
Coming to the most important KPIs. So as stated already, revenue is on a quite sufficient level, again, above EUR 1 billion. The EBITDA suffered a little bit. We came down to EUR 194.5 million -- sorry, versus EUR 250.1 million in the previous year. EBIT subsequently to the depreciation came in with EUR 47.4 million against the previous year, EUR 117.2 million.
Operating free cash flow was in the light of the ongoing investment activities, and also increasing volumes in some areas of the business on a quite sufficient level is minus EUR 33.4 million. And earnings per share following the profitability is down to EUR 0.34. But finally, we also decided to continue our stable dividend policy. This is, on the one hand side, considering the development in the profitability, but also considering the loyalty of our investors and in the long-term investors we have in our portfolio, and we will propose a dividend of EUR 0.25 to the annual shareholder meeting.
Some words about COVID-19. I'm sure some of you at least want to know a little bit how we see the situation and what we did. We had extensive measures in all of our locations in all areas of the world. We had a very fast start-up in China in January already, and we also transferred all the experience we have gained there to all the other locations.
What we can state from today's point of view, all the production facilities are in operations. Sometimes we have slight fluctuations.
In the beginning, it was in China, but this is solved quite a while already. The latest impact we have seen in India, but also there, we could continuously operate and produce. And this is now ramping back. And we have not really facing any kind of shortages in the supply chain. So also there, we were well prepared.
Summarizing, we had no COVID-19 infection issue in any of our locations so far, and production was not significantly impacted, and we expect more that from the health situation, from the health crisis situation, the recovery will be finished once India will be up and running fully again in the coming weeks.
Moving on to the revenue and EBITDA development on Slide 6. Here, you can clearly see that the revenue development over the quarters was quite a stable one. After Q3, we also stated still that we are in -- we have -- we see good opportunities to improve and to catch back a little bit in the last quarter, then COVID-19 came in and somehow impacted this development. But still, the last quarter was a quite strong one compared to last fiscal year, if we consider that COVID was already in our China factories, happening there. So if that would not have happened, the last quarter would have had the opportunity to become the strongest quarter in the fiscal year.
So totally, we came in with the already mentioned EUR 1 billion revenue and EUR 194 million EBITDA. From a revenue split by segment, Mobile Device substrate is now close to 70% of the revenues. It's a logic development, following the heavy investment we have done over the last couple of years, and most likely will continue to develop in that direction. As you know, we do the heavy investments still in that area.
But also Automotive, Industrial, Medical are quite stable, 31% of the entire business and also developing. The split by region, and again, this is the split by our end customers. This is not by value chain and partners in the value chain, 68% allocated to American customers; 16% in Germany, Austria; 8%, customers in Asia; and 8% in other European countries.
Moving on to Slide 7, a brief overview about the segment, Mobile Devices & Substrates. Here, you can see for the full fiscal year, we have a stable revenue development. Despite we have seen some decrease in the communication and mobile device area, but that was able to be compensated by the IC substrate growth. Yes, we reduced the EBITDA numbers a bit, but that was mainly caused by the product mix that showed significant changes over the year. And finally, this caused some not-so-nice balance in our factories, which ended up in some underutilized equipment because the mix was not so well balanced as it was the years before.
Moving to Slide 8. This is the development in Automotive, Industrial, Medical. Here, you can see already some impact on the revenue side for the full year, and we also see some downturn in the profitability. The main impact in the revenue -- on the revenue side came from the industrial business. As said before, already Automotive Medical were quite stable for the full year, but we had also to make some concessions to keep the business. As I said, some temporary price pressure is happening, and we also need to react to fill our factories, as long as these lower demand situation lasts.
Coming to the financials, covering the main important topics. Revenue, I talked already about. EBITDA, I talked about it as well. So I think the main topic is on this slide, financing costs. Here, we had some higher negative FX effects to consider. This is mainly the reason why we had an increase of finance cost from EUR 2 million to EUR 6.5 million. The profit and loss for the year finally came in with EUR 21.5 million, which is a decrease by 76% already. And as said already, the earnings per share came in by EUR 0.34.
About the balance sheet. Clearly, the equity also suffered a little bit mainly from impact out of the profit for the year, some significant negative currency translations, also the high dividend we paid last year and the payment we have to do for the hybrid coupon. This finally ended up in equity, in absolute numbers in EUR 760 million, which is a decrease of 5%.
The assets increased. This is mainly out of our investment activities in higher property, plant and equipment increase by this EUR 125.8 million to a level of EUR 1.85 billion. Net debt also increased. Again, it's mainly caused by the CapEx program we are driving and running. So net-net, debt came in with EUR 246.7 million. And we had also the net working capital, which improved a little bit, which is impacted mainly due to lower trade receivables and higher trade payables, which is more or less some cash.
The follow probably the reason and the result out of cash management. And the equity ratio came in with 41%, mainly impacted by the lower equity and still higher total assets.
The cash flow on the next slide. In total, I would say, for the time as we are in the -- as we are in a heavy investment phase, is doing quite well. We have generated EUR 185 million cash flow from operating activities, which is 8.5% better than the previous year. We have a cash flow -- a negative cash flow from investing activities of EUR 116 million, which is lower than last year, mainly due to lower temporary net investment in financial assets, but also higher CapEx. We have cash flow from financing activities, which was significantly lower than last year.
Last year, you can remember, we had this big promissory note loan of EUR 300 million. This year, we -- it was not necessary to issue such a big financing facility. And we had some change in cash and cash equivalents to a level of EUR 86 million. This is mainly a shift between short and long-term financing activities.
So finally, we came up with the operating free cash flow of minus EUR 33 million. As I said before, this is following the investment activities mainly into the IC substrate business. And finally, a free cash flow of EUR 68.5 million. CapEx, you see, we have started the next investment cycle with the -- on the one hand side, fully utilizing Chongqing I with the third -- the second phase, and also started already the investment for the Chongqing III facility. So CapEx in total was on a level of EUR 218.5 million.
Yes. I think this is concluding the report about the last fiscal year. So summarizing that, with a given environment and the latest development about the COVID, I think AT&S did quite a great job to keep business on a stable level. Also, we could show that our investments we have done in the past are paying out. Growth in the IC substrate is going on, and also the perspective for the future, what I will show now in the market segment is there. But also, the position in the other businesses with quite some customers and diversified customer portfolio is doing quite well. So the impact so far was not that big. Regarding the outlook, I will cover later a little bit more about the details.
So let me briefly dig into the market outlook, what is in front of us because -- what I told you so far is more or less history. We need to talk about the future as well. And I think this is, especially in times like this, very important in my point of view that we take care about the future, setup of the company, how we generate business in future and where do we focus ourselves. Already within the last couple of months, we started engaging ourselves with the market environment, what is changing, what is the new environment, is there any fundamental change we have to consider. And what I can say so far, the market we are in is quite stable in the midterm.
We definitely will see some short-term impact, especially also on the demand side. This is expected to be in the market at least for 2020 calendar year, probably a little bit also in the beginning of 2021. But our expectations for the next 4 to 5 years is quite a positive one.
That we can show also on the coming slides. On Slide 17 here, you can see the PCB and IC substrate market outlook. This shows a very nice growth for the next 5 years of almost 5%. And also, the good message is that the CAGR in almost all the segments is a positive one. And especially in the markets we are engaged in, it's even a nicer picture to be expected.
Briefly running through it, automotive shows a CAGR of 4.5% over 5 years. Industrial business also is expected to come back with 3.1% growth. We see the substrates business with 11.4%, strongly growing, and this explains why we are doing so heavy investment there. There's the communication area with 11.4%, and we have the computing consumer the one with 2.5% and the other with 3.8% growth.
So these are all the segments we are somehow addressing with our applications, and they are mainly driven, like we call it, by some game changers in the market on Slide 18. Definitely, 5G will change the demand and the growth in the...
We have different because of the [indiscernible].
Okay. What we see is 5G will drive the business. It will also impact the big data area and artificial intelligence and Internet of Things will also do its utmost to drive the electronic market segment and as well the digitalization of the society. So this is also one thing that we will benefit from and we will gain advantage out of it.
Then we have two examples. The one is digging a little bit into the details of 5G. For example, with the smartphone business, as you more probably know, we have today total smartphone population out there in the market of 1.37 billion units. The expectation is that the growth is not that big. The growth will be around 2% until 2025 to come to 1.54 billion units.
But the good message is on the right-hand side, today or end of '19, it's expected that only 16 million units are out there in the market. And until 2025, there should be 821 million 5G smartphones in the market, which represents a growth rate of 92.7%. 5G smartphones require very high-end technologies, and this is the area where we are excellent prepared for. And this should show you because sometimes we only look -- or have a closer look on the number, on the unit growth. For us, it's more important how the underlying applications and the different technologies are moving.
The second example is more about Big data and IoT. This is impacting our IC substrate business. Starting with the connected devices, which is the main source for generating data. In '19, there are 38 billion units of connected devices in the market. This is expected to grow by almost 7%, up to a level of 56 billion units until 2025. The data these devices are generating are on a 40 zetabyte level today, and it's expected within the next 5 years time frame that it is growing up to a level of 175 zetabyte with a CAGR of 26%.
This is causing a lot of demand for high-end processor modules because all these data needs to be handled, needs to be processed and needs to be transferred and end. The expectation in the market for high-end processing modules is 8% growth rate for the next 5 years and will end up in a value-wise growth for IC substrate of 11.4% because this is driven by higher demand in technology, higher layer count, bigger form factors, as it is shown on the right-hand side. And this means subsequently, this is a significant growth for IC substrate demand, also requires high capacity additions. But on the other hand side, it's a value driven growth, which is a very good message for a supplier like AT&S. It's not a volume business, it's a value business, what we are facing for the next couple of years.
This is the reason why we're doing this heavy investment in our factory in Chongqing, like you see it on Slide 22. We have shown this slide already, but just to recap. We have the second phase in Chongqing I, which is executed in -- now in 2021 and '21/'22 finally. We are fully on track. Constantly, equipment and capacities are coming on stream. So the time line we are showing here is completely in line with what we are doing in daily business.
With the Chongqing III factory, which is coming on stream 2022/2023, we again add significant capacities for the next 2 years, which is a very ambitious ramp plan. We had some impact from the COVID topic in China on our construction activities for plant III. This is now showing some 7 weeks' delay. But this is, for us, not the big issue because we expect that we can, over time, catch up quite some of these delay and come on stream online, on time.
Last, but not least, moving to our strategic area of module business. We are always asked, what is a module? For example, this picture, you see here in the presentation is a GPS module, just for explanation. So you can see a lot of components populating this very tiny small PCB or substrate. And finally, on the left-hand side, you see the package or the other package of the whole thing, and this is shipped then to the market to be assembled on a main board in some of the devices.
Why is module integration so important? Why is modularization in electronics so important? This gives the device and manufacturers and OEMs quite some significant advantage. The one is they can increase functionality and functional integration. They can increase their performance due to lower distance between the components and the lower loss. They can also reduce time to market because you can predevelop and multiuse modules in different devices. This is also reducing development cost, especially if you consider the multi-usage of modules in different devices, and it's also scalable for different applications and to be again reused.
The market for that shows 11.3% growth for the module integration market, which is somehow extending the position of AT&S in the value chain, like it is shown on Slide 25. Coming from the PCB and substrate business, moving up to the module board or module substrate supplier, then doing a next step in module integration service solutions.
This is the way we are preparing ourselves for -- we are working on that. We have already business on the module board manufacturing activities, which is mainly driven out of our Chongqing II factory, and which also causes us to do the full or to the second phase in Chongqing II now and to equip fully this plant over the next couple of months.
So if you also associated with all these activities with the market requirements, with the market demand, there's a lot of CapEx needed to implement and to be able to support the requirements on the one hand side. But on the other hand side, also all the CapEx needs to be financed. We are always asked how we are financing all the CapEx. This is shown on Slide 26. I see this as very solid financing structure. On the one hand side, you can see on the blue smaller bars, the repayment need for already existing financing facilities. On the other hand side, you can see the financing facilities we have available.
We have a very high level of existing liquid funds of around EUR 490 million, and we have a big portion of unused, but guaranteed credit lines of a level of -- no, it's the other way around. The cash and financial asset is EUR 554 million, and the unused credit lines is EUR 490 million.
So in total, we have over EUR 1 billion of financing facilities in place, and this should be sufficient to later, combined with our strong internal financing power generated out of the high EBITDA level that we can finance all the activities we have been talking about and what we are driving forward.
Finally, outlook for the fiscal year 2020/'21. I have to state that we, in a given environment, are not able to give a full year's guidance. We decided to give you an outlook for the first fiscal quarter, and we will observe the latest market development very closely.
So once the fog is clearing up, and the visibility is going up, then we will update our guidance for sure. But for the time being, we do not see us in a situation that we can give a solid full year's guidance.
For the first quarter, we expect a development on the level of the previous year as well in the revenue and the EBITDA area. We will continue our IC substrate investments and the module business. As I said before, from the market view, it is -- all the trends are intact, and we cannot just wait until the crisis is over. We need to position ourselves now to be ready once the market is also clearing up again. So the expectation is depending on the market development for maintenance and tech upgrades that we will need an investment of roundabout EUR 80 million. There, we were very restrictive. You know from the previous years, we had always guided a level EUR 80 million to EUR 100 million with additional capacities already in place. It should have been expected that it could increase. We are limiting this part due to the environment. But on the other hand side, for the strategic projects, we expect a CapEx level of EUR 410 million to come in the full fiscal year.
The midterm guidance, probably not a surprise after the market outlook I have given is expected to stay. We still see our position very well prepared, and we can keep the revenue target on the EUR 2 billion level, and also the midterm EBITDA margin stays on a 25% to 30% as well as the medium-term ROCE on a level of 12%.
So it was quite a bit longer today, but I think it was important to give you a good outlook and also to share our view about the market development, about the market situation.
And we are now available for your questions.
Thank you, Andreas Gerstenmayer, for the report. And now we want to ask the moderator to explain the Q&A session.
[Operator Instructions] And the first question comes from Joerg-Andre Finke from HSBC.
I have a few. So maybe you can address them one by one? The first one is related to the performance of the fourth quarter relative to the expectations you provided in -- when you basically adjusted the guidance due to COVID-19 spread. It seems that sales have performed significantly better in the fourth quarter. Just curious on what the reasons were, relative to the expectations you expressed in February? That's my first question.
Yes. As I said in the presentation, we were impacted by the COVID crisis in China very early. And in the beginning of February, visibility, how long the whole thing will last and how the -- how we will be able to bring back our people to the plants, how the supply chain and so on and so was really not there. So we had to decide with the given environment that we somehow incorporate some significant risk in the outlook of the rest of the fiscal year, and it turned out that due to our crisis management, we were able to recover much faster. We can also compare ourselves to other industry sectors in China as well. So we were very fast recovering. We were in some areas, one of the first companies being operative again and also the ramp-up later on was much faster than expected. So March figures were quite nicely developing and recovering from the first impressions.
Okay. Very clear. The second question relates to the midterm guidance you confirmed. What about the time frame for that midterm guidance? Is that still the same sort of 5 years' horizon? Or has that pushed back -- has been pushed back a bit because of the crisis?
Well, I think it's still this 5-year -- midterm for us is always 5 years. What we see from the markets out there, if our assumptions come true, then we should be able to fulfill it. Probably an additional information is that mainly, the growth is driven out of the investments of the -- in the IC substrate business, what we already communicated. And there, we see still a strong market development, and this should remain for the coming years.
Okay. And then on the Mobile devices segment, you indicated in the press release, there's low visibility with regard to new product launches. Can you maybe give some more details on the 5G ramp up? And what do you hear from your customers with regard to model launches here?
This is a difficult -- good question, but difficult to answer. If we would have a clear picture, then we could have stated differently in the outlook. It's hard to predict how the whole introduction of new models will be impacted. So this is the reason why we are a little bit conscious. And also why we stated that is one reason that cannot give a full year's outlook. So we are in close contact with all of the customers, and we need to see how the next weeks and months will develop and how the entire production of the new models will be kicked off.
Is there any delay or not? We don't really know -- don't know today.
Okay. And my last question is really on sort of short term actions. You also indicated in your press release that given the current environment, you're very conscious on costs and short-term management of supply chain, et cetera. Is there anything specific in terms of measures that you addressed? Or is that sort of the usually tough as long as the environment remains difficult, and visibility remains low?
We had several phases. I think this was probably also the reason why we could keep the impact on a lower level. We have initiated immediately some supply chain activities to ensure that we can operate -- continuously operate our factories. So this nicely worked out. On the other hand side, it also increased a little bit our inventory levels. But this is, I think, in the given environment, the better solution.
Going forward, we have quite restrictive cost management. Like you mentioned it before, it's the typical stuff, what you're doing there. You limit hiring of people and so on and so on and make closer decisions day by day, week-by-week decisions how to move on.
Next up is Daniel Lion from Erste Group.
Maybe starting with the IC substrate capacity increase going forward, you confirmed the timing on an annual basis also the scale. How does it look in the quarterly developments? Would you still expect that the new capacity will start coming online in the second quarter or maybe a little bit earlier? Or what's sort of time line in the quarterly perspective?
As already communicated, the ramps start -- started a little bit already, but real ramp is somewhere end of Q1. Then we will ramp throughout Q2 and have full capacity available when we are at the end of the fiscal year. So the expectation for the full year is this communicated 50% of the additional capacities.
50%? 5-0, right?
For the full year, yes. So we have average of the ramp curve, and this is ending up in 50% of the additional capacities.
Okay. And then maybe -- yes, staying with the IC substrates. From a competition point of view, when I look at big competitors in this field, like it might confuse us, they've also huge investment programs running also this year, adding strong capacity. Wouldn't you be afraid as you said that this is not a volume business that price pressure comes in somewhere later this year? Or towards 2022, when such a big increase in capacity occurs in the market?
But if you do the math about the assumed market growth, so if the market grows, really by 11 -- more than 11% every year, almost doubling within the next 5 years, so you need to double the capacities available in the market. And our simulation show us that with all the investments we see out there, still, there is a gap in available capacity is visible. So this is what we see from today's point of view and what we can assume for the next couple of years.
Okay. Good to hear. And then maybe on the mobile module business, you stated that you are working on expanding this business. Could you give us maybe a little bit more insight in terms of the development, timing of new capacities coming online? And the scalability of this business? When we -- should we expect this to occur going forward?
We communicated it already with the Q3 results that we have already started the phase 2 investment for Chongqing II, which is about EUR 160 million in total for the next 2 to 3 years.
We have already also some products, some projects under qualification. We are, for the time being, I think, you can understand that and know that we cannot disclose details about that, but some first revenues, we will already see around fiscal year.
Okay. Very good. And then a little bit of detail on the CapEx splits and the CapEx developments. CapEx was actually significantly lower in the last fiscal year than expected and also guided to some extent. Which of these CapEx were shifted in which region they were shifted now to the current fiscal year? And how do you see the CapEx split of this EUR 410 million or EUR 490 million in total, with regards to the certain technologies that you are investing? Could you give us a breakup of this figure?
So what I can tell you is probably if the background of the question is also, is there any delay in the projects, and that has caused some shifts in CapEx from last year to this fiscal year, I can clearly state there's no delay in the projects. What we always need to consider is several impacting factors. The one is in projects like that, you have still ongoing technology development activities, which could cause also some shift of the one or the other equipment from one period to the next. Then we always try to pay at the latest possible moment. And thirdly, you always have the qualification of equipment, and we only pay once everything is solved and all the specifications we have agreed with the suppliers are met.
So sometimes, we have already started using and operating equipment, but did not finally pay everything and all rates for the equipment. This causes in every year, quite some significant shift from the one to the next year, one topic.
The next topic is out of this EUR 410 million, round about EUR 220 million -- EUR 320 million, sorry, EUR 320 million will be allocated to the IC substrate expansion, and the rest will be distributed for the other factories like Chongqing II, what we have just mentioned. Some additions in Shanghai for technologies, but also the Korea investment, what we have communicated.
Okay. And last question for the time being on your first quarter guidance. You hinted flattish developments compared to last year. What would be the drivers here? Would it be similar basically maybe to the fourth quarter, the IC substrate business and medical business? Some are giving you a comparable development to last year overall or due to the trends changing in shipment?
I think the mix should be a similar one like the fourth quarter, so still a very strong IC substrate business with some upside if you compare quarter 1 last year to quarter 1 this year. We have quite some sufficient demand in the smartphone area, but our first fiscal quarter is always the low season part, so comparable most likely to last year.
Industrial, yes, on a low level, stable to last year's development. Automotive, it's -- this is the one area where we have the biggest question marks and the visibility is the lowest one. There we have daily changes and daily interaction with the customers. And medical should be somehow flat to the last year's situation. And potentially could recover in the rest of the fiscal year.
Okay. Maybe a follow-up on the automotive demand. Of course, I guess, April was rather bleak in terms of order intake. But how does the situation now developing in May, now that the plants are being opened at the European OEMs?
Yes. Now we are talking about monthly reporting in a quarter, so give us a little bit more time when we report out the first -- about the first quarter. In general, what is expected is that the low visibility and high volatility, especially in automotive business, will stay a while. Our expectation is also that at least the summertime will not show a very strong demand in automotive. We see also still a short time working in all of the OEMs areas, but also on the Tier 1 side. So the recovery is not really there. They restarted their production, but they did not really fully ramp their facilities.
The next question comes from Teresa Schinwald from Raiffeisen CENTROBANK.
The first one is more general and midterm-oriented one, although it's also concerning automotive because as I've seen, the value forecast for this business have been reduced quite significantly. And could you give us some indication why is that? There's a delay in the autonomous driving trends. Is it a volume trends? If you could give us your insights, please?
Probably, I did not fully get your question. Are we talking about the automotive business or the general business or?
Yes, I'm talking about the general automotive -- the automotive business, but the midterm outlook.
Yes. Okay. Understood. So the midterm outlook, like we see it, we have shown in the markets development slide on – where was it?
12.
It was 12. Our expectation in automotive business is that until 2025, we see a 4.5% growth, which is mainly driven by 2 impacting areas. The one is the -- and what we expect to be very strong as well as the e-mobility area, also driven out of all the CO2 discussions. And also probably you can also hear it that quite some of the governments are now thinking about bringing in some incentives for consumers to invest more into e-mobility. And later in the time line, there will be also a recovery of the autonomous driving activities. And in total, the expectation is that this general trend will initiate additional growth.
When it really will kick in is the big question. Everyone we are talking to is the -- it will recover starting summer in 2021. The main applications, which are, for us, important is, as I said before, on the one hand side, the e-mobility part with the power management and whatever, and on the autonomous driving area, these are the applications in the sensing area, radar, LIDAR, camera, but also communication vehicle to X-communication and so on. These both areas we are addressing. And our expectation is also that over time, we are benefiting from that development.
And now my more housekeeping questions. Could you give us the U.S. dollar effect on sales and EBITDA in the full year?
Give me a second, just want to go fully. This is EBIT revenue. So we have on the sales side, we have around up EUR 32 million impact, is a positive impact. And almost -- it's in EUR 31 million is on EBIT, and also EUR 32 million is on EBITDA.
And my last one concerns the comparatively high tax payments in the past fiscal year, especially when it comes to the level of profit. Why is that? And can we expect this to stay or to recede?
This question, I will hand over to Mr. Leitner. He is our tax expert, so he can explain it quite well. So Mr. Leitner, please.
Okay. The different tax rate comes out of the different results of the different entities. And this changed from year-to-year and depends on that. On the entities level, it's very normal from the tax rate.
We have a follow-up question coming from Joerg-Andre Finke from HSBC.
I actually have 2 follow-up questions. The first one relates to your -- to the ramp-up in IC substrates. Can you remind us of the contracts structure? So what kind of volume is sold already? And what kind of pricing level would you expect or what is maybe fixed? That's my first question.
Okay. This is, again, a good question, but very difficult to answer because we cannot talk about any kind of contracts. There, we have very strict NDAs in place. What we can state, and we have already stated, is that we have achieved a certain partnership agreement, which is somehow mitigating the -- in our industry, it's not really traditional that we will have fixed consumption contracts that -- or guarantees that the capacity will be utilized. But in total, we see a good partnership with an important customer that is helping us to reduce the investment risk on the one hand side. On the other hand side, from the purely business point of view and also with the market outlook I have given, that today's capacity utilization is very high. Every additional capacity we bring online is used up already. So we could also, today, sell more than we can produce. So we have more a shortage situation. And our expectation is due to the market outlook that this will last for the next couple of years.
Very clear. And my second follow-up is basically relate to one of your comments on the mobile devices seasonality with the sort of low quarter at the moment. I was just thinking about COVID-19, Andreas that the seasonality would have changed a bit, given the impact on Chinese New Year, et cetera, and would probably lead to a seasonally somewhat stronger fiscal Q1 for you? Is that a wrong assumption?
I don't think so. What we should assume is that with the given environment, at least, the seasonality will come back to the traditional patterns. We had some years in the past where we have not seen this strong seasonality because the market environment was much more stable, and we also were able to utilize our capacity also in the lower season to a higher level.
Our expectation more is this year is a traditional year. If nothing extraordinary should happen, then we have a traditional low season. In terms of when is the high season, this is the bigger question mark, as I stated in the comments to the annual guidance. From today's point of view, our visibility is low. If the introduction, if the ramp of the new projects will start on time, this -- if that would happen, it could also delay a bit -- little bit the high season and the peak season to a later point of the year.
Dear, Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your questions and also for your interest. We run out of time, and therefore, we close the conference call. We say thank you and wish you a nice day.
Thank you very much.