Ladies and gentlemen thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Fourth Quarter 2024 Materialise Financial Results Conference Call. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers’ presentation there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Harriet Fried of Alliance Advisors. Harriet, please go ahead.

Thank you for joining us today for Materialise's quarterly earnings call. With us on the call are Brigitte de Vet-Veithen, Chief Executive Officer; and Koen Berges, Chief Financial Officer. Today's call and webcast are being accompanied by a slide presentation that reviews Materialise's strategic, financial and operational performance for the fourth quarter of 2024, as well as the full year. To access the slides, if you've not already done so, please go to the Investor Relations section of the Company's website at www.materialise.com. The earnings press release issued earlier today can also be found on that page. Before we get started, I'd like to remind you that management may make forward-looking statements regarding the Company's plans, expectations and growth prospects, among other things. These forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown uncertainties and risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from the expectations expressed, including competitive dynamics and industry change. Any forward-looking statements, including those related to the Company's future results and activities, represent management's estimates as of today and should not be relied upon as representing their estimates as of any subsequent date. Management disclaims any duty to update or revise any forward-looking statements to reflect future events or changes in expectations. A more detailed description of the risks and uncertainties and other factors that may impact the Company's future business or financial results can be found in the Company's most recent annual report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC. Finally, management will discuss certain non-IFRS measures on today's call. A reconciliation table is contained in the earnings release and at the end of the slide presentation. And with that, I'd like to turn the call over to Brigitte de Vet-Veithen. Brigitte, please go ahead.

Good morning and good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining us today. I'm very pleased to present our fourth quarter and full year 2024 results to you. You can find the agenda for our call on Slide 3. Now as you know, I've now been in my role of CEO for Materialise for 1 year. I'm proud of the achievements we have realized in this year and I would like to highlight some major milestones realized in 2024 in this call. I will also reflect on the achievements and our results of the fourth quarter. After that, I will pass the floor to Koen, who will go in more detail through our financial results. Finally, I will come back and explain what we expect 2025 to bring. When we've completed our prepared remarks, we'll be happy to respond to questions. 2024 has been a difficult year for the industry, driven by high interest rates, geopolitical tensions and a difficult economic climate. I am very proud that in this difficult climate, we realized 4% growth and managed to keep our adjusted EBIT stable, while continuing to invest in our growth businesses and while making progress on our strategic objectives. On Slide 4, I will highlight some of those strategic objectives and major achievements in the various segments. Starting with Medical. We continue to make progress on our journey towards mass personalization, where our aim is to bring personalization to many more patients. We broadened the patient population that can benefit from our solutions by reducing our lead times, thanks to the opening of our U.S. plant and further automating our processes in order to conquer the trauma market, so patients that cannot be scheduled and need to be treated within the week. We also brought personalization to new markets and in…

Thank you, Brigitte. Good morning or good afternoon to all of you on this call. I'll begin with a brief review of our consolidated revenue on Slide 5. As a reminder, please note that unless stated otherwise, all comparisons in this call are against our results for the fourth quarter and the full year 2023. In the final quarter of the year 2024, our revenue increased slightly to €65.7 million. Materialise Medical continued its double-digit growth, increasing its revenue by more than 14% and once again posted a quarterly revenue record. Manufacturing on the other hand, remained confronted by challenging market conditions that even intensified in the last months of the year, while software continued its transition towards a recurring revenue business model which will positively impact its revenue potential in the future. As you can see in the graph on the right side of the page, Materialise Medical accounted for close to half of our consolidated revenue during the fourth quarter of 2024. Materialise Manufacturing for 35% and Materialise Software for 17%, reflecting the impact of the different growth rates of the 3 business segments. For the full year 2024, we generated over €267 million of revenue which is 4% above 2023. Our Medical segment represented 44%, Manufacturing 40% and Software 16% of the annual revenue total. The amount of deferred revenue in our balance sheet related to software licenses and maintenance fees increased in Q4 2024 by €5.9 million, ending at €46.9 million. The total deferred revenue reported on our balance sheet was just above €59 million at the end of the year. Now on Slide 6, you will see our consolidated adjusted EBITDA and EBIT numbers for the fourth quarter as well as for the full year. Consolidated adjusted EBITDA for the fourth quarter amounted to €4.3…

Thank you, Koen. Let's turn to Page 12 for a quick review of our financial guidance. Looking at 2025, we remain confident that our Medical and Software business will continue to grow with the growth of our Materialise Software segment still not being fully reflected in the segment's revenues as we continue to transition towards a cloud-based subscription business model. At the same time, we expect that the uncertain macroeconomic industrial environment in Europe will persist in 2025 and will continue to impact our Manufacturing segment which is particularly exposed to the European environment. As a result, we expect revenues to be in the range of €270 million to €285 million and adjusted EBIT in the range of €6 million to €10 million. We intend to continue our investments in the growth markets of the future and in particular, in the Medical segment and the factory management solutions and software, while keeping a strong focus on cost control and optimization in our Manufacturing segment and our corporate overhead. Whereas our guidance reflects the impact of the uncertain economic environment in Europe on our manufacturing business, we believe Materialise is ideally positioned in the market for personalized medical products and the market for additive software and for manufacturing services, thanks to our strong product portfolio, continued investments in innovation and our strong financial foundation. This concludes our prepared remarks. Operator, we're now ready to open the call to questions.

[Operator Instructions] And our first question will come from Alexander Craeymeersch with Kepler.

Alexander from Kepler Cheuvreux here. Yes. Actually, I have a couple of questions, 5, if that's possible. So first, could you remind us of the main margin difference between recurring and nonrecurring revenue in the software segment? Second question would be, what is there the average lifetime on the subscription? And the third question also on Software would be how much of the revenue in Software is now recurring versus nonrecurring? I saw some highlights there but I've calculated it's still about 2/3 nonrecurring. Does that sound about correct? Then maybe I'm going to list all my questions first and then let you answer. So the fourth question would be if you could give us some granularity on the one-offs. I'm talking specifically on the increased R&D spend, the ACTech start-up and the FEops integration combined with restructuring costs. If you could just give us a bit of a split how much that impacted the adjusted EBIT in the fourth quarter given that the guidance of €11 million to €14 million that you provided at the end of Q3 was -- clearly, that had an impact there? And then, the last question would be considering the difficult climate that you talked about was already present after Q3, yet you decided to send an optimistic message in October. Could you tell us what exactly has changed and that you didn't have the visibility on the fourth quarter by the end of October?

Thank you, Alexander, for the 5 questions. Trying to decide in which order I will tackle them or we will tackle them. While I have to admit that your first question is not exactly clear to me. So you wanted to understand the margin difference between the recurring and the nonrecurring revenue in Software?

Yes, in the Software segment, so you're going from a nonrecurring to a subscription model. I was just wondering if there's any large margin difference there.

No, I don't think you can expect a large margin difference on the difference.

The revenue recognition, Alexander though is different, of course, in the 2 scenarios, whereas in the old perpetual license model, we take the revenue immediately into P&L and whereas in a recurring revenue model, we gradually take it over the duration of the contracts. Maybe picking also into your question on what the split is between recurring and nonrecurring revenue within our Software segment. There we see, as in the previous quarter, a continued transition towards recurring revenue. If you look at the situation at year-end, we're roughly at about 76%, so just above 75% or 3/4 of the revenue, the total Software revenue that we consider as to be recurring.

And then maybe tackling your software question on the average lifetime of the subscription. So most of our subscription-based revenue, you should expect an annual, so 1-year lifetime. Then maybe shifting to the question on the clarification on the operational spend.

Yes. If I understood you correctly, Alexander, on how these different components that you mentioned impact the Q4 cost increase. Without having -- without providing the detailed breakdown, I would say, about half of the cost increase that I mentioned quarter versus the last quarter of last year which is between €1.5 million and €2 million, that amount which is half of the total cost increase comes from the 3 elements you listed and FEops integration, the restructuring costs that we took and the operation -- the purely operational impact from the ACTech plant startup.

And then maybe commenting on your last question on the -- whether we saw this coming or not. Well, the first thing I would want to say we had said at the -- with the third quarter results, we already indicated to be very cautious about -- around the fourth quarter results to be expected, in particular, in the Manufacturing segment as we were expecting the move to our new plant to reduce the operational capacity. The industrial climate was already very cautious at that point in time. However, what we did see is that in the fourth quarter, we saw that climate accelerate, in particular in Europe. And that is what you see now reflected in our fourth quarter results and the 2025 guidance. Does that answer your questions, Alexander?

Yes, it does [ph]. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] And our next question comes from Troy Jensen with Cantor Fitzgerald.

So I guess my question is, first of all, deferred revenue, that was like a huge kind of growth in the quarter in the Software segment. I guess, I was more hopeful that we would hear better kind of forecast of the Software business. But can you just explain why it's such a big step function in deferred revenues this quarter, Koen?

Yes. The deferred revenue went up with just below €6 million in the fourth quarter which is something we had anticipated. It's in line also if you look at the seasonality with prior years, there's quite some large contracts at the end of the year where we typically see in the first and the last quarter of the year a buildup of deferred revenue and then a depletion in the second and the third quarter. So for us, it was in line with what we anticipated, though it was larger than last year and which is, of course, also the effect from the conversion to more recurring revenue that we are doing.

And then just a follow-up on this OpEx question. How much of this €1.5 million to €2 million that you're mentioning falls off quickly? Or can you kind of help us out with -- we had big step functions and kind of growth in OpEx sequentially in December, in March, are they going to be down now on a sequential basis because these onetime-ish items fall out? Or do they still hang around also?

If I can just comment. So Koen pointed out at the increased R&D, the ACTech start-up cost and the FEops integration. If you look at those 3, the ACTech start-up costs should taper down. The increased R&D, we do want to continue to accelerate our investments in the Medical business, in particular, as we very much believe in the growth -- future growth there. Now the FEops integration costs should also taper down as we go.

Do you think just like on an absolute basis, it's up or down sequentially? I mean, are you guys going to kind of cut costs now, Brigitte, to try to kind of get back to higher profitability levels? Or are these going to...

It's essentially what I said earlier that throughout 2025, we'll certainly -- we'll have a strong focus on cost control and optimization, in particular in the Manufacturing segment going forward.

Okay, that's fine. And then how about just last on European weakness, I mean get European auto makes sense but is it much broader than just the automotive vertical?

Can you repeat that question, Troy?

Just the European weakness, I would understand auto is really weak in Europe. Is it just -- is it broader than automotive...

So the automotive sector is particularly weak in Europe. It's slightly broader because of the uncertainty, certainly in the fourth quarter with also the impact of the Trump administration in the U.S. on Europe, et cetera. So there's uncertainty factors around that.

I show no further questions in the queue at this time. I would now like to turn the call back over to Brigitte for closing remarks.

Thanks again for joining us today. We look forward to continuing our dialogue with you through investor conferences or in one-on-one meetings or calls. Please do reach out if you have any further questions. And with that, I want to say thank you and goodbye for now.

This does conclude today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.