MBB SE
XETRA:MBB
MBB SE
MBB SE is a holding company, which engages in the acquisition and management of portfolio companies. The company is headquartered in Berlin, Berlin and currently employs 3,541 full-time employees. The company went IPO on 2008-06-23. The firm makes investments in entities seeking to sell off a part of their business or the entire operation, perhaps as part of a succession process; selling a subdivision or an affiliated entity that no longer forms part of the organization's core business, and seeking for a management buyout or buy-in. The company targets investments in firms with turnovers of 10 million euros and above. Its portfolio consists of Aumann AG, specializing in e-mobility, coil winding and automation, CT Formpolster GmbH, a producer of flexible polyurethane foams, Delignit AG, a supplier of ecological hardwood-based materials, DTS IT AG, a cloud computing and cyber security provider, Hanke Tissue Spolka Z O.O., a producer of tissue paper, and OBO-Werke GmbH, a supplier of products for model construction, toolmaking and mould production, among others.
Earnings Calls
MBB achieved a robust Q1, boasting a 27% revenue growth to EUR 260 million and a 32% increase in adjusted EBITDA to EUR 30 million, elevating its margin to 11.5%. Key growth drivers included the Service & Infrastructure segment, particularly Friedrich Vorwerk, which recorded a remarkable 73% revenue increase. Looking ahead, MBB projects 2025 revenues between EUR 1 billion and EUR 1.1 billion with EBITDA margins of 11% to 14%. The company anticipates Friedrich Vorwerk reaching EUR 540-570 million in revenue and 16%-17% EBITDA margin. A strong order book of EUR 1.1 billion and strategic initiatives position MBB well for future growth.
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Good afternoon, and a warm welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to today's earnings call of MBB SE following the publication of the financial figures for Q1 2025. The CIO, Torben Teichler, will speak in a moment and guide us through the presentation and the results. After the presentation, you have the opportunity to place your questions directly to him. We're looking forward to the presentation. And having said this, Mr. Teichler, the stage is yours.
Yes. Thank you very much, and good afternoon, everyone. My name is Torben Teichler. I'm the CIO of MBB. And for those of you who maybe don't know me yet, I'm with the company for 8 years now and have been on the Board since 2021 and transition into the CFO role now in around about 2 months. And in that capacity, we will also take over Investor Relations from Constantin Mang, who together, as you know, with Jakob Amer, has decided to not extend his contract after a really phenomenal run at the company over the past years.
So I'd like to take this opportunity again to really thank both for their great work and the achievement at MBB, and it has really been an honor to work with both of them, and -- but we all wish both of them all the best.
All right. Let's jump right into it. And let me start maybe with a quick recap of what makes MBB special for those of you, especially who are new to the company. MBB offers long-term succession solutions to sustainable Mittelstand companies. And the way we do this is pretty unique, I would say. First of all, because we are a family business ourselves. So we had 2 main shareholders who formed the company 30 years ago. And therefore, we share pretty much the same DNA with the companies we actually want to acquire.
Secondly, we are hands of the capital market. And what you see us having an earnings call here today, but also 3 of our subsidiaries are stock listed, Friedrich Vorwerk, Aumann and Aumann. We, as a family business, have a long-term focus. So we don't buy for the short term, we buy for the long term, meaning we have no intention to sell when we buy and we seek to develop and grow our companies in the long term.
And last but not least, we focus on sustainable businesses which doesn't mean that we are dogmatic or have a somewhat environmental agenda, but we certainly believe in trends and the energy transition, for example, or IT security just offer enormous business potential as we'll see later in the presentation. Before we get to the Q1 figures, I'd like to highlight one thing.
We managed to finally enter the [ SDAQ, ] both with Friedrich Vorwerk as well as MBB. We're really proud of that. For those who follow us for a bit longer, you know that has been one of our ambitions for quite some time. And yes, we're really proud and happy to have achieved that not only with one company, but even with 2 pretty much at the same time here last Friday at MBB and on 17th of April with Vorwerk. So we'll work hard to stay there. And with that, let's move to our Q1 figures, which have really been a very good and nice start to the year.
We had a strong first quarter, as you can see here, with 27% revenue growth to EUR 260 million and adjusted EBITDA growth, which stood at 32% at EUR 30 million adjusted EBITDA, and that allowed us to increase our margin even a little bit to 11.5%. So overall, I'd say a really good start to the year, and we'll elaborate on the drivers now in the next couple of slides and then look at the individual companies, and I'll give you an update on where we stand here. Yes.
Maybe taking the segment view first here, the driver of this really good Q1 development was the Service & Infrastructure segment with both Friedrich Vorwerk and DTS delivering excellent results, particularly looking here at the more than 100% increase in EBITDA. And on the other hand, you see here the 2 other segments, Technological Applications and Consumer Goods, which had a more humble start, let's say, into the year, however, pretty much as expected.
And I'll take you now into the individual segments and the companies with Friedrich Vorwerk here on the left side, clearly showing a very good start to the year with actually phenomenal start to the year with 73% year-on-year top line growth to EUR 133 million and almost 14% EBITDA margin. And that was driven on the one hand by smooth execution and good progress on a number of projects, but particularly also [ North, ] which I'm sure most of you have heard about.
And secondly, we had generally mild weather conditions in the first quarter, and that tends to have a fairly strong impact on the output. Friedrich Vorwerk can generate in the first quarter. So the environment has just been very good for Friedrich Vorwerk here in the first quarter in terms of wet weather also. And projects and the high output and utilization we had in the company allowed for a very strong EBITDA margin increase by around 5 percentage points to 13.7% in Q1.
Well, looking ahead, you see the figure here. We have a well-filled order book of EUR 1.1 billion at the end of the first quarter. But there are also a couple of new projects, both from the electricity and the gas sector, which are providing additional tailwind. And as you might have seen this morning, Friedrich Vorwerk announced the order win of Section 3 of the SuedLink electricity Highway. That's a really large triple-digit million euro project in which [indiscernible] has a 40% stake. But it's not only, let's say, related to the energy -- to the electricity business, but also in the gas and the hydrogen segment.
We really see good project activity with the company having just won the SEL 3 pipeline, was announced, I think, 2 weeks ago, which is also a triple-digit million euro project in which Friedrich Vorwerk has a large share. So you see the dynamics are good on the electricity side, but also on the gas side and also hydrogen. There are a couple of projects in the market. And generally, of course, a very nice tailwind we have and the company has been very -- was able to execute on these available projects which gives us good visibility in general going forward.
So for 2025, Friedrich Vorwerk expects, therefore, to reach the upper end of its revenue guidance of EUR 540 million to EUR 570 million with an EBITDA margin of 16% to 17%. And obviously, the strong Q1 is picking this up quite nicely. Turning to the right now, DTS. The company also had really a very nice start to the year with revenues growing by 20% to EUR 26 million and also with a decent EBITDA margin of 15%. And we're really encouraged to see here that the company bounced back strongly after the rather muted second half of last year with demand recovering now and generally also the outlook on Q2 being rather positive. So that is really encouraging and good to see for us.
Beyond that, all the software sales growth has again supported profitability. And DTS has just bought back the minority shares in ISL, the remaining minority shares in ISL, which provides a large part of that software development. So I think that's also going to help us going forward.
Looking ahead, yes, for the whole year, we're rather optimistic on further growth and expect the focus on IT security in general, but also the formation of a new German government with its fiscal spending plans to provide positive tailwinds for this year and beyond. So to wrap it up, Vorwerk and DTS have really been the growth engines this quarter. And generally, we expect them to contribute to our results also in the remainder of the year.
Turning to Technological Applications. The Q1, development has been rather soft at both Aumann and Delignit owing to the generally weaker demand in the automotive industry. Nevertheless, if we look at Aumann on the left side, we managed to improve the adjusted EBITDA margin to around 11%, and that was thanks to effective cost management and still solid order book. Revenues contracted 6%. That was pretty much expected and order intake is still down year-on-year by around 30%. Nevertheless, this is the second quarter where we see a quarterly improvement on the order intake front. So that's at least the first positive sign on the order front.
Beyond that, there are a number of projects, especially in the Next Automation segment, the company is working on. So that focuses on industrial automation, aviation, life science, maybe some related sectors. And we hope the company can win and succeed there in order to diversify the market further. And with that, our view on 2025, our management's view on 2025 is still that the guidance of EUR 210 million to EUR 230 million in revenues with an EBITDA margin of 8% to 10% looks very well in reach for now.
Yes, on the right side, Delignit has also seen a challenging environment with especially light commercial vehicle demand still mixed and the OEM customers having rather volatile falloff. Nevertheless, despite the revenue decline by 6%, the company has been very proactive in adjusting its cost base and managed to sift through this environment. There are also here a couple of interesting opportunities outside the automotive industry, particularly in the [ rail ] business. And management is also looking at one or the other M&A opportunity.
So overall, I would say the guidance for 2025 remains cautious at EUR 68 million in revenues and 6% to 7% EBITDA. But yes, we'll see what the second half of the year brings. At the moment, that's what we see, and it's pretty much a development we'd expected by the beginning of the year. Turning to Consumer Goods. Finally, we had a somewhat softer, let's say, consumer environment, which led to this moderate start into the year. At Hanke, we had temporarily lower productivity, which was majorly, however, due to the ramp-up of our new converting machinery. As you know, we've been investing at the company to increase our converting capacity where we are able to convert the model roll production out of the company into converted product. And that is slowly coming on stream, particularly in the second half of the year and allows us to convert almost 100% of the model roll we produce.
And that obviously is a tailwind for revenue and especially profitability as well. Converted product is obviously higher value than the rather commodity model role. So the outlook for us here is that Hanke should do rather well in the second half again, while CT Formpolster, we've hopefully seen the bottom now in a rather, let's say, muted furniture market in general, and we see a slight improvement and hope to see further ones as we move along now through the year.
To summarize, we've had really strong tailwinds from the Services and Infrastructure segment with Friedrich Vorwerk and DTS benefiting from healthy demand and good execution in general, and we expect that to continue also in the remainder of the year and to compensate for this rather modest development we've seen in the rest of the portfolio. Our guidance of EUR 1 billion to EUR 1.1 billion in revenues with an EBITDA margin of 11% to 14%, let's say, cautiously reflects that dynamic and also the overall volatile market environment we are currently seeing. But given that Q1 tends to be a seasonally weak quarter, generally, the fairly strong start to the year is clearly an encouraging data point for our guidance.
Turning to our balance sheet. Yes, we've seen the seasonal change in working capital primarily some investments, additional share buybacks compared to the end of Q4. Nonetheless, as you can see, our balance sheet remains rock solid with EUR 467 million in net cash at group level, of which EUR 262 million are attributable to the holding MBB SE. And that obviously provides us with ample room to maneuver in the current environment, but also to pursue M&A, further share buybacks and obviously pay a dividend.
And we've already announced that we will again propose an increase to our base dividend at the AGM at the end of June to EUR 1.11. That would be our 15th consecutive increase in the base dividend. And given the 30th anniversary of MBB, we also intend to pay an extra dividend of EUR 2.22. That overall is then EUR 3.33 and amounts to almost EUR 18 million in dividends and comes on top on the share buyback program, which we just finished at the end of April, where we bought back MBB shares for around EUR 30 million at an average price of EUR 115 per share. And -- but at least looking at the share price today, I think that has been a rather good deal.
Yes, last but not least, looking at our current valuation, we still, despite the good share price development, believe that MBB shares are attractively valued. And as you can see here, our share and our listed subsidiaries plus the cash we have here at the holding level more than covers our current market cap. And that obviously doesn't even attribute any value to really great companies such as DTS or Hanke, which you basically get for free at the moment. So I hope I was able to give you a brief walk through our portfolio and Q1 figures here. And I'm happy to take your questions now.
Congratulations on your growing numbers. [Operator Instructions] So far, you must have been very clear, Mr. Teichler, because there are no questions yet. And it doesn't seem like that. Therefore, we come to the end of today's earnings call. If there should be any questions left, you can always reach Investor Relations. I wish you all a wonderful remainder of Tuesday. And with this, I hand over again to Mr. Teichler for some final remarks.
Well, thank you very much for your interest in MBB. I look forward to seeing and hearing from you again soon. And should any questions arise or you are in Berlin at any point in time by any chance, just let us know. We are always happy to engage. So all the best, and thanks very much again.