Earnings call transcript: Inficon reports Q3 2025 sales decline, stock drops

Inficon Holding reported a decrease in sales for the third quarter of 2025, with revenue falling by 4.9% year-over-year to $163.9 million. Despite the decline, the company’s book-to-bill ratio remained above 1, indicating strong future demand. The stock price reacted negatively, dropping 0.61% to $97.40 in pre-market trading. According to InvestingPro data, the company maintains strong financial health with a "GOOD" overall score, particularly excelling in profitability metrics. Inficon’s management remains focused on long-term growth, particularly in the semiconductor and refrigerant markets.

Key Takeaways

• Sales for Q3 2025 fell by 4.9% year-over-year to $163.9 million.
• Gross margin decreased by 4.4 percentage points to 43%.
• The book-to-bill ratio was above 1 for the third consecutive quarter.
• Stock price fell by 0.61% in pre-market trading.
• Inficon is expanding capabilities in AI-related semiconductor segments.

Company Performance

Inficon’s performance in the third quarter of 2025 reflected challenges in the semiconductor and security markets. Sales declined by 4.9% compared to the same period last year, and gross margin fell to 43%. Despite these challenges, the company reported a positive book-to-bill ratio, suggesting robust demand for future orders. Inficon is focusing on growth areas such as the semiconductor and refrigerant markets, which are expected to drive future revenue.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: $163.9 million, down 4.9% year-over-year
• Gross Margin: 43%, down 4.4 percentage points year-over-year
• Operating Income: $22.9 million, representing 14% of sales
• Net Income: $17.3 million, 10.6% of sales
• Operating Cash Flow: $26.7 million
• Net Cash: $60.5 million

Market Reaction

Inficon’s stock price declined by 0.61% in pre-market trading following the earnings announcement, closing at $97.40. This movement reflects investor concerns over the company’s declining sales and gross margin. The stock remains within its 52-week range, with a high of $121 and a low of $66.60, indicating that while the reaction was negative, it was not overly severe compared to broader market trends.

Outlook & Guidance

Inficon provided full-year revenue guidance of $660 to $680 million, with an operating income margin target of 16-17%. The company anticipates a ramp-up in the semiconductor market in late 2026 or 2027, driven by advancements in AI-related segments. Inficon is committed to maintaining a long-term operating income margin of over 20%.

Executive Commentary

CEO Oliver Wyrsch emphasized the company’s strategic focus on growth areas, stating, "In a storm, you can do bold moves and really move forward." He reiterated Inficon’s commitment to maintaining a 20%+ operating income margin, asserting, "We are the 20%+ operating income company, and the system hasn’t changed."

Risks and Challenges

• Supply Chain Restructuring: Ongoing adjustments to reduce tariff impacts may affect short-term efficiency.
• Market Volatility: Fluctuations in the Chinese market present both opportunities and risks.
• Semiconductor Market: Current flat to slow growth in this sector could impact future revenue.
• Security and Energy Market: A cyclical downturn may continue to affect sales.
• Margin Pressures: Trade disputes and capacity duplication efforts could impact margins.

Q&A

During the earnings call, analysts inquired about the impact of trade disputes and capacity duplication on margins. Management explained efforts to mitigate these pressures through supply chain restructuring. Questions also focused on the dynamics of the Chinese market and the complexity of the semiconductor sector, with Inficon highlighting opportunities in the refrigerant and data center markets.

Full transcript - Inficon Holding (IFCN) Q3 2025:

Bernhard Schweizer, Investor Relations, INFICON: It’s 9:30 A.M. by my watch, so good morning and welcome everyone. My name is Bernhard Schweizer, Investor Relations contact at INFICON. I have the pleasure of hosting the webcast of our third quarter 2025 results conference. With us today are Oliver Wyrsch, CEO of INFICON, and Matthias Tröndle, CFO of INFICON. The management team will first present the results and then take questions during management’s prepared remarks online. Participants are kindly requested to turn off their microphones and camera during the following Q&A sessions. Participants are then invited to switch their microphones and cameras on when asking questions. Participants can add themselves to the queue of people wanting to ask questions by clicking on the I raise my hand icon. Alternatively, you can also use the chat function in MS Teams.

You should have received by now a press release on the Q3 results together with a link to the accompanying visuals for this web conference. All documents are available for download in the investor section of the INFICON website inficon.com. I would also like to inform you that we record this web conference to archive the audio file later on the INFICON website. The oral statements made by INFICON during these sessions may contain forward-looking statements that do not solely relate to historical or current facts. These forward-looking statements are based on the current plans and expectations of our management and are subject to a number of uncertainties and risks that could significantly affect our current plans and expectations as well as future results of operations and financial condition.

We undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Having said all that, I would like to hand over now to Oliver Wyrsch. Oliver, please.

Oliver Wyrsch, CEO, INFICON: Thank you very much, Bernhard. Welcome everyone. Great for having you here today. Welcome to our Q3. About the agenda, we have the usual agenda. First, I will tell you a bit more about the markets, the key messages about the target markets developments, and about our full year expectations. Then I will hand over to Matthias Tröndle, our CFO, for more details on Q3 results. Certainly stormy times these days, but at the same time it’s the time for making bold moves, we believe, and it’s not the time for hunkering down. We actually have quite a lot of optimism here, and I will tell you in the next couple slides why we see it that way. Even though, of course, it’s also a bit rough going. Q3 results: We have an ongoing positive order trend with the third consecutive quarter with a book-to-bill above one.

In a quite demanding environment in all our markets, we show continuous resilience despite the market weaknesses, and we have temporary profitability impacts due to the trade disputes ongoing. If you look at the orders, we can see that they increase substantially year on year, and they’re up in all end markets and all regions except Europe, with resilient sales year to date, roughly flat. The shipping these days is also a little bit disrupted at times through these trade disputes. For us, we looked at this as a flat development and also Q3 sales of $164 million. We look at good results. We had a tough comparison with last year. We’ll get back to that, when we had large semi orders out of China chipmaker that we delivered.

If you look at the segments briefly in our overview, we have growth of semiconductors in all regions, offset by a weakened market in China regarding sales, resulting in flat year to date, minus 1%. The broad ramp of the industry, we believe, is further delayed due to these disputes and negative investment developments. Where projects delay further on the timeline, they don’t go away, but they evolve further. We believe ramp is rather second half 2026 or even partially in 2027. General vacuum is growing in 2025 with another good quarter, plus 7% year to date, plus 6% quarter on quarter, solid Q3 RAC Auto results. I will talk more about that growth. Even though the market is partially in consolidation, plus 4% year to date. Security and energy is in a usual cyclical downturn where we have government program timings mostly defining these cycles.

We have, however, already received first larger orders again from the next program wave. If you look at operating results, operating margin at 14%. The key factors there are lingering temporary impact from the trade disputes. One key thing there is the capacity duplication. I get back to that in a minute. Negative foreign exchange effects. That’s mainly the strong Swiss franc versus the US dollar and tariff impact. Efficiency measures are in execution around all that. Regarding the capacity duplication, what is that? As you know, in Q2 we showed how we move the production. This reconfiguration is largely concluded now and we have adjusted to the new trade world. In that sense, what we do still have is we have capacity in the former production location that needs to be ramped down over time.

If you want to look at that in a big picture, then you could say we have still too much capacity in the West as we have ramped up real fast pace in the East. Now it’s about ramping down the capacities in the West that we do not need anymore because we supply our customers directly out of the East. When we look at the FX impacts, these affect part of our locations. It’s an effect we are also working on ramping down. It’s basically similar measures, right? Moving around headcounts and capacity, and tariffs I believe we have been able to reduce quite significantly versus the last quarter through these measures, though there’s some that still remain and some few ones will even stay for the foreseeable future. If I continue here, we will go into all these topics in more detail through the presentations.

Operating cash flow at the robust $27 million, and then when we look at organization, as I mentioned, the production reconfiguration is concluded, but of course still some of this duplication needs to be managed, which we are with high priority working on. With this new setup, we avoid the substantial trade dispute impacts. This is barriers and tariffs, other factors that we are able to avoid like this. I believe we are very well positioned now for future different scenarios. There’s a lot of uncertainty, of course, and I believe you’re positioned for all of these different scenarios. We continue to invest in leading edge R&D with 8% of sales. I think this is a key point when we look at our orders. I’ll get back to that also in a minute. When we look at CapEx, this is a little bit slower than before.

I believe we have the CapEx. When we move production capacity, we typically don’t need so much additional CapEx because we’re moving tools and so on. We’re looking at about $20 million, $25 million for CapEx when we look at the overall picture and also tie it together while we push forward with leading edge R&D and are really optimistic. There is we winning for three factors really, and that’s also why we could show orders different than many others in these industries where we have really interesting R&D pipeline, where we winning new business, we opening up new applications that weren’t possible to be sensorized before. There was no measurement possible before. That’s also harsher environments with all the leading edge logic, for instance, or leading edge memory.

There’s clear market share gain and there is also a couple of interesting smaller markets that we focus on that we find are equally interesting as the semi market. Good growth, good profitability, and they actually show strong resilience in these more difficult economic times. Three good drivers for why our orders are up and I believe this is the time for bold moves for INFICON, really move forward and focus on the customer. If we dive into the different perspectives here, worldwide markets and sales, we made one change for you, a little bit increased transparency in the sense we show now four regions. I think it’s quite relevant to show these four regions. That’s how we internally think, that’s how we structure our innovation organization and also production in supply chain. We’re looking now at Asia Pacific, China, Europe, and Americas.

If you look at the development there regarding sales, you can see two regions are down in Q3, two regions are up. All in all, you can see a positive trend, especially in Europe and Asia Pacific, and China and America is a bit slower. There’s some reflection of the U.S. trade restrictions in that. If you then jump into the different target markets, starting with semiconductor and vacuum coating, we are in a very strong position. As I just mentioned, I believe now is the time where we really expand our footprint there in the market. Opening up new application, gaining market share, and the innovation pipeline is on fire. I think it’s also in the slower times, the time where you can with your customers truly innovate on the next generation of products or the one after of their products.

That’s really what we see these times when we look at the general market development. The broad industry ramp, as I mentioned earlier, we believe is delayed due to the trade tension which constrains the growth and delayed investments. That is a timing that we cannot influence. That’s the industry. Some subsegment, though, are of course already ramping, but it’s too narrow. Specifically, the one around AI, that is HPC and HBM, certainly very interesting. That’s a few players that play well and there’s a few others that are trying to catch up. That’s where CapEx investments happen on a larger scale and where we see an acceleration, but it is still too narrow. When you look at the other submarkets within the semiconductor market, there’s everything from being really quite hot and ramping to slowing down again.

I think also what is interesting, as opposed to maybe also other cycles, is it’s a bit back and forth. We see things like last year in China, we had an acceleration in chip makers’ investment that we then also shipped. That is also why our comparison year on year on the Q3 is tough because we shipped that all in Q3. We then saw a slowdown of this chip maker business in China, but an acceleration of the tool maker. The first half of this year, we shipped that too. Now we see again that has slowed down, but a bit of an uptick again in China. There is so much, this is an example, so much going back and forth. The visibility is really quite low. When we look at the market outlook for semiconductor, we look at this flat to slow.

The main reason for that is actually we are trending flat to last year and I think if you had shipped everything, we could be even a little bit ahead. The last year’s Q4 quarter was really quite huge, an absolute record quarter because we shipped so much. Also for the chip makers, that $100 million, to repeat that, that will be not so easy. It’s possible. That’s why we are saying flat to slow on this. All in all, really optimistic about what’s happening in the partnerships with our customers where we work on the next generation of our products. A lot of new wins across the board. Quite exciting technology updates and you’ll know you will hear more about that in other formats as well. If we then jump into RAC Auto target market, I think also here we expand our already strong position.

This is a market that overall is not growing necessarily. At least part of it, especially the EV part of it, has just passed through rock bottom and is now picking up slowly. We clearly gain market share there with our leading edge products. I think we’re at least a generation ahead there and we’re also winning in the East, which is very important. That also shows how localized we can operate innovation and manufacturing. Here we had a growth, as you see in the chart on the right, of 30% in 2023. You could sustain that level and grow ever since in 2024. This year we show growth with year to date plus 4%. I think we expanded this market, important next to auto and EV.

That again is past the rock bottom and seems to be slowly picking up in spite of all the headwinds from policy to consumption. Two other things are also important. One is the build of data centers, which is something where we profit from clearly, obviously on the semiconductor end market. We also profit from it here because the air conditioning market is a key supporter of these data centers, a very key ingredient to build large data centers. That’s where we see a really strong dynamic now emerging just over the last couple of quarters. The other one is a bit of a longer term one, the new refrigerants due to the climate policy changes that drives our new sensor growth. That’s also new innovations from us that are able to detect these new refrigerants, which drives that market as well. All in all, a really strong R&D pipeline.

I think ELT is strong. Stratos is strong. There’s a couple of other strong products here. What also is a factor here is specifically for the handhelds. Our competition is American. We were able to relatively quickly move now in Q2 our production out of China. Everybody manufactures in China and now are supplied globally out of Malaysia. We see market gains there too because of this really fast reaction. Yes, it cost us. We got a big ding, right. We see it in the operating income, but we also see the benefits on it already now emerging in these gains. We move on to the next target market, General Vacuum. Quite excited about that. I think we show continued sales growth after 2024 was slower. Remember 2023 was COVID opening and shipping of all the backlog, so a bit of an outlier.

Now in 2025 you see continued growth and you see year to date, the +7% year on year significantly up, quarter on quarter up. I think this shows also the strong position that we further expand. This is a bucket of many smaller markets, maybe 20 or so that we carefully select regarding our position, what we can contribute, the growth potential, the profitability potential. I think now is also the time of these smaller industrial, advanced industrial markets or also big science markets or life science markets which show strength where we can further expand our position, but they also grow. One thing is missing still is the solar market, which is an interesting part of this basket of markets. We believe this is still in consolidation.

There’s a lot of overcapacity specifically in China, and it’s very likely that the recovery really only comes end of 2026 or even slips partially into 2027. Nonetheless, I think there’s a lot of reason for optimism as you also hear build out our strong positions across the submarkets. The last market, security and energy. As I mentioned, we have number one product here, but this is driven by these large government programs, big ones in the U.S. but also across NATO and also in the East. We have been rolling out a couple of programs over the last couple of years. You see the massive growth that we’ve shown from 2022 to 2024. This year was expected to be slower, but we have already seen good order entry again. The first pieces are coming. This is not a full new cycle.

I think we are still working on the new programs and they will come in, but it’s a good sign of how dynamic this is. Of course, with the security situation, defense budgets go up all around, specifically in Europe. Plus, specific new habitat generation is able to go into a number of new applications. Explosives, narcotics, environment, testing, these are all additional submarkets that we are adding over time. Remember here the qualification period is really multiple years, so this all takes a lot of time. I think we show good progress, but until you truly see it in the numbers for these new markets, that will still take some time. We have first really interesting wins. When we move to the expectations 2025, I think there’s reason for optimism for us regarding our market position, how we expanded our order situation and also the market outlook.

Orders remain strong. They’re the first, the third consecutive quarters that they’re above one, quite significantly above last year, year to date across multiple dimensions. What is difficult is still the outlook described it before with the example of China. That goes across different submarkets, different geographies. It’s a back and forth, it’s murky, it’s changing quick, it’s volatile. I think for us it’s key that we’re well positioned, that we expand our position and then whatever submarket will start to ramp, we’re part of the game and we can show that already now, I believe, and will continue to do so.

The uncertainties are there, but we also have prepared ourselves over Q2 in particular, but also Q3, to be positioned with our global footprint for innovation, for manufacturing, to be really close to the customer, react fast and supply product, but also innovate together in all four regions, which I’m very optimistic about for the future, no matter what exactly the impacts can be. Efficiency measures though are required. I told you, broadly it’s a ramp down in the west and a ramp up in the east. That doesn’t go entirely, that goes a little bit in parallel. That’s the time where we are in, where there’s certain inefficiencies. When we look at the full year guidance, we narrowed it to $660 million to $680 million of sales and an operating income to 16% to 17%. I think this gap to 2020 is our benchmark.

20% is where we’re going to go back to. Our business model is 20% plus and we have a path beyond that. There are three major factors if you look at the full year. One is this duplicated capacity that we are rapidly reducing. One is FX, which is largely Swiss franc, which we are also addressing, but it will probably not go fully away. We are addressing it with also moving. The third one is tariffs, and tariffs we have already halved from the last quarter and we further work on this as we optimize the stream of the goods across the INFICON world. With that, I finish with our typical picture here. Follow us if you want to have more insight into what’s going on at INFICON on different dimensions. I think there are two or three interesting most recent posts that have been made.

One is the expansion of the clean room in Longmont, exciting new expansion for our American customers to supply them more closely and faster and ramp there. That’s a product that we do there that ramps real quick, actually that’s part of the new market gains that we make. Malaysia, you know about that. You can also see that we are investing into further global service. Always stay close to the customer, especially in difficult stormy times. That’s when you gain, so we expand global service and repair capacities, especially also in these times. We continue to invest in that, and you also see leading edge product development across the board from big science, like there close to Chicago and Fermilab. I actually personally know this experiment quite well. It’s a super exciting experiment where they challenge the standard model of physics.

Also, of course, in a more broader sector where we lead the thinking around how smart manufacturing needs to look in semiconductor fabs. We are taking over the lead of the global semi org’s special industry group that develops the future vision of that. Across the board, I think really interesting news. Yes, it’s also been a difficult part, a lot of extra work impacts on the bottom line, but I think the optimism is well justified. With this, I want to close and move over to our CFO Matthias Tröndle, who will give you a few more details on the financials.

Matthias Tröndle, CFO, INFICON: Good morning everyone. Welcome to our Q3 conference call. As usual I will guide you briefly through the financials and also comment the guidance. Let me first start with the highlights for Q3. In Q3 the book-to-bill ratio was above one for the third time in a row, which is very good. We also saw a substantial order increase year over year. In all end markets our sales showed a slight decrease with 4.9% versus Q3 last year. The gross margin just addressed by, commended by Oliver, dropped clearly to 43%, hit by temporary impacts from trade-related disputes and reached 43% as a consequence. Operating income reached $22.9 million or 14% of sales. From a balance sheet point of view, investments and capital expenditures reached $6.1 million, slightly higher than last year and also slightly higher than in the previous quarter.

The cash flow ended with solid $26.7 million, driving the cash to a level of $60.5 million, which is $9 million higher than Q3 last year. The equity ratio increased by 4 percentage points and reached strong 69%. Now let me go a little bit more into the details. As you have seen and as commended, we reached sales of $163.9 million compared to Q3 last year, which represents a slight reduction of 4.9% compared to previous quarter. This is slightly lower by 2.1%. Oliver did already comment the end market developments compared to Q3 last year. Sales to the general vacuum market increased for the third time in a row and did grow by 20%. Refrigeration, air conditioning and automotive sales developed well with a plus of 9%. The semiconductor vacuum coating declined by 14% versus the strong and actually the second best quarter last year.

Sales to the security and energy market dropped by 52%. When we take a look to the regional performance, which we have expanded and modified, and we did break down Asia into Asia Pacific and China and will do this also for the future, we see Asia Pacific surged by 23% where sales to most markets did grow strongly. China decreased 22% mainly due to slower semiconductor business. Europe increased by 4% and Americas were slow due to weak security and energy business. Let’s go to the operating expense. R&D cost did decrease by 5.3% driven by some efficiency gains. While we still continue to have focus on our development activities and the related investments, the SG&A cost did increase by 4.8%. This increase is mainly driven by foreign currency impacts and costs stayed tightly managed. Now turning to the margin situation. Q3 margins have been under pressure and declined.

The gross profit margin reached 43%, basically the same level as Q2, and decreased by 4.4 percentage points versus last year Q3. The operating profit for the third quarter reached 14% compared to 20.3% last year, a reduction of 6.3 percentage points. What were the main reasons for that? We had several temporary negative impacts, direct or indirect, related from trade disputes which were tariff impacts due to increased base tariff levels, which is mostly related to shipments from Asia to the U.S. as well as from Europe to the U.S. These are the main drivers. Cost due to strategic duplication efforts, reconfiguration of the production. We had negative impacts on the gross margin and operating expense from persistence, from headwinds, from the exchange rates. Main drivers here, as Oliver mentioned, the Euro and the Swiss franc against the U.S.

dollar, and on top we had, of course, some other efficiency measures we had to implement which did drive this down. All impacts together did account for around 6%, 6 percentage points. Let’s go to the income tax. Income tax for the third quarter was at $7.1 million, which represents a tax rate of 24.7% compared to 21.2% in Q3 last year. The net income reached $17.3 million or 10.6%. This is due to the lower operating income and somewhat higher tax rate. Now let’s move on to the balance sheet highlights. Our net cash reached $60.5 million, which is about $14 million lower than end of last year, but about $9 million higher than last year Q3. The terms for inventory developed stable with 2.4 and the DSO ratio reached 48 days, a good and comparable level to Q4 last year.

Our working capital, which consists of accounts receivables, inventory minus accounts payables, closed at $224 million or 34.2% of sales, and with that ended about $9 million higher than end of last year and about $4 million lower than previous quarter Q2. The increase in inventory, the increase is mainly driven by the change in inventory for the working capital, which is also impacted to a certain degree by some unfavorable currency movements. Our operating cash flow reached a solid level of $26.7 million, improved against previous quarter by $8 million and slightly lower than Q4 last year. The balance sheet, as already mentioned, at a strong equity ratio of 69%. Those were my comments on the balance sheet and Q3 result. Just let me finish with the guidance. As you can see here, we show revenues and operating income or sales and operating income.

We are positive on the order situation and in general with the assessment of our various end markets which we serve. Certain risk and uncertainties definitely connected to the results and the ongoing trade disputes and the unfavorable FX impacts might remain. Based on that, we updated and narrowed our guidance for the full year of 2025 and expect revenues of $660 to $680 million with an overall income margin of 16 to 17%. With that, I would like to close the presentation. The next events are our analyst day here in Balzers, Liechtenstein on November 20th and then we see us again in March with Q4 and the full year results for 2024. Now we are ready to take your questions.

Bernhard Schweizer, Investor Relations, INFICON: Thank you, gentlemen. The first questions will come from Jorn Ifert. Jorn, please.

Hey, thank you very much. Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. I would have three questions and I would go back in the queue. The first one, similar to Q2, the margins were maybe a little bit short of market expectations. Can you give us a margin bridge? What exactly was the duplication cost carries you mentioned was around 100 basis points? And what was FX? What is the path out of this? When do we expect margins, gross profit margins, to go back to this 46%, 47%? This is the first question, please.

Oliver Wyrsch, CEO, INFICON: Okay, let’s do it one by one, then I’ll start and then Matthias can add a little bit. For Q3 specifically, it moves around. Maybe it’s the first comment. Right. Q1 is very different from Q2, and Q3 again is very different from Q2, and Q4 will also be different. This is all moving around. What is exactly happening? In Q3 we have the tariffs at about 1%. They’re talking now operating income margin. Two and a half percent is this capacity duplication. About 2% is the FX impact. There are a few more smaller items, smaller than 1% for the restructuring. Right. Severance. There are things like that when you are moving around your organization. When you look at the full year, we would say that we end up with about three equal shares.

Probably the capacity duplication could be still a bit bigger than the other ones, but the three shares will roughly be the tariffs, the capacity duplication, and the FX. There are a few other things still for the reorganization that will be those smaller. If you look at Q3 over Q2, I think that’s also an important factor. In Q2 we said we have about 2% tariffs that went down to 1%. That shows we are working through this at a very accelerated rate through this reconfiguration. It’s all of bureaucracy in place. I tell you also, bureaucracy is complicated these times. Nobody has clear answers. There is a lot of back and forth. We’re working forward and have made really good progress. We halved that. The capacity duplication you could hardly see in Q2 yet, obviously, because we did it during Q2.

That was about half a percentage point at the time. The FX was about 1.5% in Q2 and increased a bit. I think it works itself through the system. Also, when we look at next year, one scenario could be exciting in the second half. A nice ramp in semi and a couple of other markets ramping up, one scenario. The other scenario is we end up in a stagflation maybe in the U.S. and other places. Inflation goes up, growth slows down because of hesitation for investments. There might be more on that we will see. To kind of roughly bridge you from Q2 to Q3 to full year, that helps you maybe on the open. I think maybe Matthias, if you want to get a few more points.

Matthias Tröndle, CFO, INFICON: Not much to add. Martin, maybe the tariffs. The impact of tariffs is going down in comparison to Q2. This is on the one hand side a little bit driven by this escalation period in April, May. The tariffs have been high in Q2 in April, May especially. We also worked on many items and of course we implemented certain structures which did help to minimize it to a 1% level. The biggest swing basically is in FX and capacity duplication. As Oliver mentioned, FX was 1.5% roughly in Q2. Now we see more 2% level. Was the impact foreseeable? Yes, I would say but the level and the actual scale of the impact was a little bit higher than what we expected actually in Q3, I must say for FX. We had a set of different other measures which roughly account for 4.5%.

In total about 6% from a year to date point of view. The 6% comparison is in the range of 3.5% plus minus a little bit. Year to date impact is in that area of 3.5%.

Oliver Wyrsch, CEO, INFICON: Maybe a general word, Jon, because you also ask where are we going from there? While we’re not giving guidance for next year, of course, we are the 20%+ operating income company and the system hasn’t changed. This for me is, it sounds maybe too optimistic to you, but I’ll explain why this is noise in the system for me because we are moving now and making gains, but we have to go and do it quick. I think it’s the time where we do the bold moves and not hunker down and protect our margin. I think now is the time where we can actually really make these moves with customers, which I tried to outline. Now it’s also a bit more in the system still. We’re ready for a ramp actually in different markets, not only semi, but it isn’t coming yet, isn’t broad enough.

When it comes, we will be ready for it and this will lift the whole system up. I have no real particular reason for pessimism or we don’t on our profitability either. I think where I truly get excited is what can you achieve in these stormy times, in these difficult times with agility. That’s what we really try to play. That’s also the reason for our optimism, I think. Let’s see what happens in a year from now, how far we get with this. I think it’s quite exciting, but we’ll see, right? Whatever scenario it is, if it’s a ramp, it’s clear, it’s fun. It’s like strapping, like always when you have a semiconductor up. If not, we’ll play this game where we go and gain market share, where we R&D a lot and then push forward like this. I hope this answers your question.

Thank you. I would move on maybe with the next two questions. I will take them together. Second question is on China. Semiconductor business was down. You explained there’s some lumpiness. Did order accelerate already? Have you monitored any changes on market shares, that you lost some market shares, for example? The third question would be the leading indicators like the memory chip prices. I mean, going through the roof, this usually would indicate that supply is tight. You are saying the opposite side. Your vacuum peers are saying the opposite side. How do you explain then the materially increasing chip price at the end of the day when supply is too much?

It’s a good question, Jordan. I think this time around in this cycle, it’s just a little bit harder to understand what these signals mean. Some of the signals are there, but you don’t see the effects of it. I think it’s because they’re stacked other factors on top or around it that blur the whole. I mean, again, if you take Liberation Day out and run that scenario, there wouldn’t have been a Liberation Day. In Q1 we saw these signals that there would be a ramp in the second half for semi, yet it isn’t here. It came and went in some pieces. I think the only one that is continuously growing is this narrow AI ramp around HPC and HBM, which is a few key players. I think you all know them and a bunch that want to catch up.

There’s a whole other half or more that doesn’t really participate and has a big back and forth. The other factor that is also in there, and I think it’s important that you guys know that you’re starting to participate in that market too, is the fabless market, which is obviously only software because there’s no real hardware unless they’re mandating certain hardware from their foundries. When you really look at the semiconductor market, the revenues increase mainly in the fabless sector. Fabless has not so much to do with building manufacturing unless you go and sell software, of course. There’s also this trend that maybe is important to outline. Now you ask also about China. China is back and forth and more than before, volatility. I tried to describe this earlier in the call as an example.

Yes, the orders are up again, but they’ve been up and down and up depending on different sectors, different players. I also know the warehouses, they’re well filled. Not everything is installed. Hard to read these times. I can only say that we are really close to these customers in China. It’s very dynamic, it’s exciting. The R&D is also exciting there. The outlook, the visibility is difficult. I think what we’ve seen is that there’s also no reason for complete boom on the Chinese economy, even though there’s a lot of overcapacity. I think there’s a little bit of a hoarding going on on some points of the time that we’ve seen the last one or two years. There is also a reason for moderate optimism there across the board in China. I mean, we show also now actually interesting growth.

I think it’s probably a bit more market share growth than market growth than we show. It’s a bit more dynamic in the market that are not semi, to be honest, just now in this most recent quarter. Generally, as we stated, all orders are up across all end markets. Different variabilities. Quite some really made a jump versus last year and some a little bit more moderately. I think hopefully that helps and I answer both of your question there.

Thank you. I go back in the queue.

Thank you, Jorn.

Bernhard Schweizer, Investor Relations, INFICON: Thank you, Joern. The next questions come from Naij Lavic. Naij, please.

Hello, good morning. Thank you for taking my questions. I would have two on the first one. This year you have book-to-bill above 1. Last year you had probably a much higher backlog. When we look at this major order you got in Security and Energy, could you maybe give us an indication of how big this order is? If we adjust for that, would the book-to-bill still be above 1?

Oliver Wyrsch, CEO, INFICON: Clearly this is just one factor. I think this is not actually the biggest piece in it at all, honestly. The biggest pieces are, as I mentioned in RAC Auto and genvac across multiple markets in there where we really see a nice continued growth, especially in this year. SNE goes through this trough because of the stacking of the programs. It’s a bit hard at times to deliver. They have really these massive cycles and that is just the first nice step. We’re talking a single digit higher, single digit something. It comes in pieces also as always, what is exciting is also it comes from new places. This is interesting because we are or we launch this product with the idea to go address more markets, right. I think the defense market, chemical warfare detection, we squarely on, we’re the leader.

There are other markets that are related to this and are very similar organizations. We see now that we’re making inroads there. This is really an early indicator and this will go over time. How you receive these orders, the timing of it is a little hard to predict. This is about approval levels moving through and so on. Important for you to know is that the main drivers are actually the other marks. I would also want to stress also semi is up. It’s not massively up, but it’s up. We couldn’t ship everything that came in with the orders. You need to know Q2 was really busy with moving products around, supply chains reorganization. When you move a product from one region to the other, you have to rebuild the whole supply chain. Meaning you go for every piece or every part of your product.

You go out there in the market, you try to find a new supplier, you need to qualify it. There’s a little bit of quality issues back and forth. We have high tolerances, always high accuracy pieces. This is all a lot of work to be done. There’s noise in the system, but like I stated in the beginning, now it’s not about hunkering down and protecting the margin. That’s what we believe. I think now is the time to move fast, bold and go right in there. We see already the first effects. Specifically I mentioned this move from Shanghai to Kuala Lumpur of the handheld leak detectors where we now play full on this advantage in the market that we can supply from a different place and the supply chain is up.

I hope this explains a little bit, gives a bit color of what happens behind the scenes. I think we could show really good sales for that. We have actually a lot of new production sites with new people and new suppliers and everything. If you look at how you ramp up a location, that is extreme speed. I’m extremely proud of how the team navigated this and built this up. I mean, some other players in the field right now are calling up places to find a plot of land to maybe build a factory in a new region. We’re there, it’s running, it’s a little noise, okay, but we’re doing it and the customer really appreciates it. Through this crisis or storm, we have been always right there with them. There’s no supply delay, there’s solutions.

We do paint sharing, we find innovation solutions, we just push right through. I think that’s where my optimism is coming from.

All right, thank you very much. Maybe on my second question, unfortunately it’s again about the margin, but congrats on the book-to-bill. Let’s assume the operating part goes away. Maybe you get up to 18%, but there’s also the mix factor, right? I mean, in China, historically I’m assuming you’ve had better than average margins or at least this has been the story and this seems to be going down and you have general vacuum and other segments that are outgrowing. You are a 20% EBIT margin. Looking forward, is that really sustainable? Assuming this muted outlook persists in semi.

I mean the ramp will come, that is sure. Now the question is when it comes and that we cannot influence. I can assure you when it happens in one of the sub segment, as we described also last year, we’re entrenched in most of these segments quite, quite deeply. We will go and profit from it. Regarding mix, I would not worry so much about China. China can have good margins and bad margins. It depends very much on the customer there, let’s say maybe how mature they are, early days. It’s a lot about price. This is the same thing. This is an RTA. This is an RTA who is cheaper. When you really try to push up the yield and that just is still actually happening, yields are not as high there at all in the fabs. You can really want to push it up.

It comes down to the actual capabilities of these sensors. We have both. I wouldn’t worry about this, frankly. I’m more worried about honestly the inflation coming next year. We’ll have to work through that, which will be a lot of wasted time again where we renegotiate all the prices with suppliers and customers. About the overall margin that we go back to 20%, I’m not worried about because I know how the mechanics work, how the pricing works, how our outstanding market position is. In the end that’s how we can price right when we have true innovation that stands out versus competition and then we can price it the same or better as in the past. I believe we’re making actually really strong progress on most of these innovations with our customers, especially these days.

You need to remember in slower years there’s more capacity, more tool time to go and test out things. Most companies, even the ones that are really suffering a bit, they’re actually making these investments on the next generation products. We do have all these R&D projects ongoing, especially now at a higher pace. Hope that helps, Nish.

Yeah, thank you very much.

Bernhard Schweizer, Investor Relations, INFICON: The next questions come from Craig Abbott. Craig, please.

Yes, good morning, gentlemen. Hi there. Good morning. I appreciate, you know, you still feel very confident about the business model midterm getting back to 20% plus. That’s very encouraging. If we just look real short term for a moment, the midpoint of your new guidance range for this year implies actually a pretty steep increase in Q4 sequentially, both for the top line as well as for the operating profit margin. You’ve talked us through the bridge factors. Thank you for that. I’m just wondering how much visibility you have at this stage given all the moving parts in your end markets. How much visibility do you have that you really will, excuse me, will really be able to achieve that new margin guidance for this year? Thank you.

Oliver Wyrsch, CEO, INFICON: Yeah, thank you, Craig. Look, I have to say visibility is much lower than in prior times. There’s upside potential, there’s downside potential, that’s probably what I can say. We have solid models of how we work through this. We have orders in house, we know margins, so we can build out a lot of these different scenarios and understand what happens. I think at this point, the way we see it is this 3, 4 percentage points on the bottom line come from these three areas to almost equal parts, affects the duplication tariffs. I think that’s roughly what the different models showed us. We have, I think, a pretty strong confidence. I have to say the visibility is much lower. There’s a lot of unforeseen impacts out there in the market and in the supply chain. That is difficult.

One other thing we didn’t talk about, by the way, is in Q3 at the back end, we also had the Moon Festival and the typhoon, which was not a great combination because then the ports were closed for some time right at the end of the quarter. A little bit of revenue also got stuck in China or Asia because of that. That’s just one example that comes on top of the other things. Typhoons happen every year and the revenue is going to come just a quarter later. It is many things these times that are unforeseen, I have to say. It’s a different world somehow that we live in. Never was it really fully predictable, but it’s more difficult this year, very much in particular. Maybe if you have some more comments, Matthias, on the.

Matthias Tröndle, CFO, INFICON: Yeah.

Oliver Wyrsch, CEO, INFICON: Margin maybe.

Matthias Tröndle, CFO, INFICON: Yeah. When we take a look to Q4, I think and then you compare what we guided. Q4 should be a pretty good quarter from a top line perspective and also a better quarter than Q3 from a profitability point of view. About visibility, I think it’s, I would say, as usual. Right. We don’t have nine months of backlog and we feel safe and secure on the top line, but the backlog is at a normal level since quite some time. We do the forecast to the best of our knowledge with our salespeople and customers and production facilities. Of course there’s a range in there, what we can achieve potentially. We also know, as Oliver said, that our risk also on the output side, what can we deliver when. That’s one question mark, of course. We have a range in there and could be a very good quarter.

That’s what we’re planning for actually and you can calculate it back when you want and then you see that it should be very good. It includes certain risks but also some opportunities.

Oliver Wyrsch, CEO, INFICON: Yeah. The problem is not actually sales and orders. I think it’s about execution for sales maybe, but it is about these additional factors that just work itself through the system and we work on all of them to reduce them dramatically, and as you’ve seen in tariffs, we have halved them in a quarter. That is not entirely predictable. The bureaucracy isn’t even predictable. Right. Craig, I would like to have more clarity and we normally don’t give a range. You see it in that too at this point of time in the year. That’s a little bit reflecting of where we think we’re going to be landing. One more word on Q3 again, I would stress that last year Q3 was a very strong quarter.

I think Q3, given the seasonality, I see this as a good sales quarter even though a few things got stuck because of supply chain and typhoon and Moon Festival and so on. There’s no reason to think that Q4 should be particularly bad. Q4 is always a strong quarter internally. We joke around sometimes and call it the Hollywood finish. It’s really at the back end of it with good planning together with the customer it goes swoops all out. There’s a lot of trucks going from our factories always in December.

Okay, I appreciate that candidness, gentlemen. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Craig.

Bernhard Schweizer, Investor Relations, INFICON: Michal Inaun has the next questions for us. Michal, please.

Yes, good morning everyone. Hope you can hear me. Camera should come online any moment. Yeah, here I go. I had just a couple of questions, actually three: two around semi and one is around more the RAC Auto market. On the semi side, I’m sure you’re not giving me an answer, but I’m just wondering if the semi book-to-bill ratio is also above 1 in Q3 or not. The second is pretty simple. The market starts to be really cautious on China. I mean, it has been already before, maybe it’s now easing a little bit even. China wafer fabrication equipment 2026 is seen down. I was just wondering what would be the impact for you, and this is mostly probably also Western OEMs that struggle. I mean, we heard it from Lam yesterday.

I would like to understand what impact that would have on your business in China if wafer fabrication equipment spending would be down. The third one, I was pretty surprised now, positively, hearing about—I think you were talking about A2L refrigerants in the U.S. and regulation. I remember I’ve asked you about it a couple of quarters ago and you were a bit hesitant on that. I was just wondering where do you see there INFICON play a role? Because what we have seen in the recent quarters is a ramp up, particularly on the sensor side, included in the HVAC systems in the U.S. I was wondering where is your role in that business and where do you see that potential?

Oliver Wyrsch, CEO, INFICON: Thank you very much. There’s quite a number of questions. Let me go one by one. Okay. Semi. Yes, all end markets are up. Yes, also semi. The most exciting up right now year to date is RAC Auto and general. Right. Semi is back and forth. It’s what I described. Actually, you need any look under the hood. There’s five to ten sub-markets there, they’re all moving around and the only one that’s consistent is HVAC HBM for a couple key players and we know them, they’re mainly in Asia into three particular places. I hope I answered that one. Otherwise, get back to me.

So.

Do you need to give me some clarification? Are you asking about China slowing down, or are you asking about trade barriers that our U.S. customers would have, and if you can still keep the—

Market then, I mean, it’s actually a bit a combination. Yes, because wave of fabrication equipment overall is seen down also. Let’s move the restriction aside. Overall, the wave of fabrication equipment spending is seen down for China 2026. If that was the case, how would that actually impact your business? Do you think you can still grow in China with the Chinese OEMs, although the overall business would be down?

Yeah, I mean what we’ve seen a shift over the last two, three years is that the China business moves to Chinese OEMs. We are as entrenched there as in the U.S. For us, we are in China for 30 years. We manufacture there, we innovate there. I think the American customers are fantastic partners and it’s great to work with them, but we can also work with OEMs in China and the future is that way that you need to work with them too. They have good innovations, they grow really fast. This year was the year of the tool makers in China. It’s a bit unclear how it’s going to go from here on out because the first half of the year was really dynamic, positively. As I mentioned earlier, there’s no reason to have real pessimism. It is obviously over the times when China just ploughed ahead.

These tech sectors we are in though, they always have a bit better dynamic than the rest of the market. Different tech sectors, I’m not only talking about semi submarkets, I’m talking about others too. Right, yeah. That’s a mix. We’re optimistic there. I mean, in the end we ship it to the U.S. or to China. In the end, honestly, it all ends up anyway in China and even U.S. customers, you don’t get to the U.S. and you ship actually also to Asia for their manufacturing there.

Matthias Tröndle, CFO, INFICON: Thank you.

Oliver Wyrsch, CEO, INFICON: All right, you had a last question about refrigerant, right, Michael?

Yes, correct.

I think maybe we had this discussion already a year, one and a half ago.

Yes, we did. Yeah.

You put me on the spot and I, at the time, I wasn’t exactly sure how much it is a driver already. We saw the regulations, we monitor them. I think it has really developed in a good tailwind across the board. The new thing now is the data centers that come on top and we couldn’t see it either. I think I remember just about a year ago, it’s like, do we participate or are we not? At the beginning, why it’s hard is it goes through channel partners, so we would also supply an OEM typically, and then it goes somewhere else. You need to have these conversations with them when you map out the future business together and innovation roadmap, what do you need and where are you selling this to, and so on. Over time, it materializes for us, but we first see the positive dynamics.

The refrigerants have broadened and you ask what are those? I think one key factor, but it’s not the only one, is certainly the handheld leak detectors that are growing actually steadily quarter over quarter, I think probably for eight quarters. Don’t take me up on this exactly. Right, Matthias. I mean, they have just been plowing through and building up. Interesting enough, these guys have been very affected by these tariffs and trade barriers. We moved around the production and now we’re really ahead of the competition because we can supply and they can’t, or with difficult trade barriers and tariffs on top of massive extent. I’m actually quite optimistic there too, for future because of this move specifically as outside of. Right. All good, Michael, all answered? Yeah.

Thank you very much, guys. Thank you for that. Take care.

Bernhard Schweizer, Investor Relations, INFICON: There are no further questions at this moment. May I invite you, Oliver, to share your closing remarks with us?

Oliver Wyrsch, CEO, INFICON: Absolutely. Thank you very much everybody for the interest, for showing up, for coming here. It’s great to always have such a big crowd. Good questions. You are big supporters of us, also give us good impulses in these discussions. I would just close with this. Yes, we have some noise in the system. We don’t like it at all. We go back to this 20%+. I think the bigger picture here is important. In a storm, you can do bold moves and really move forward. I think we are, and we’ll show you over the next quarters. We’ll show you what’s happened. It doesn’t matter what scenario happens. We all want the ramp. If it happens a little bit later, also okay for us. With that, please take with a little bit of optimism in this complicated, stormy times.

We meet again soon for full year next year, when we will then tell you about the full story of the year. With that, big thanks. Have a wonderful day and talk soon.

Matthias Tröndle, CFO, INFICON: Thank you.

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