Investor Relations

Dear Stakeholders,

When reflecting on 2024, we can honestly state that it was an especially challenging year for the entire industry, and SECO was not immune to these challenges. Our market was characterized by persistently weak demand, and our company, in this landscape and for the first time after many years, closed the financial year with a loss. Despite these adversities, we are proud to have maintained our focus on strengthening customer relationships, accelerating our technological leadership, optimizing the supply chain, increasing the efficiency of operations, and maintaining a solid financial standing. These efforts have strengthened our processes and our organizational structure, so that we are properly prepared for the future. Our constant commitment to innovation, to strategic partnerships, and to sustainability has strengthened our resilience and enabled us to emerge even stronger as a business.

This last year was marked by a series of macroeconomic challenges, accompanied by a prolonged trend of destocking by most of our customers. All of this subjected SECO and the entire industry to contracting revenues and consequent pressures on operating margins. Nonetheless, our proactive strategies for managing risk and our solid capacity for execution have enabled us to mitigate these effects.

Our financial performance for 2024 reflects both the solidity of our business model and the dedication of our entire team. We posted consolidated revenues of €183.5mn, a contraction of 12.54% from the previous year. Despite this decline, we were able to support our earnings potential even in this challenging market landscape. This stability is the result of our strategy focused on high-margin products and services, and on our Clea IoT software suite in particular, which continues to be well received by our customers. We have also focused our attention on a series of actions to optimize inventories, which resulted in an improvement of working capital. At December 31, 2024, our debt fell to €52.5mn, which reflects the overall solidity of our accounts.

Over the last year, we made remarkable progress in the execution of our business. Not only did we continue to increase our share of wallet with existing customers, we also obtained important contracts with global players like Hitachi, Carel, and BDTA. Our leadership in the design and production of industrial IoT solutions was further strengthened by a number of strategic actions. This includes new and consolidated partnerships with the leading producers of semiconductors, which gives us early access to some of the most cutting-edge technologies being developed. For example, as the IIoT Design Center for Qualcomm in Europe, we are among the world's first to work on Snapdragon® X Elite, their new family of high-performance, energy-efficient chips compatible with Windows and Linux operating systems. These are an ideal solution for industrial applications, and they are already seeing growing market demand. We have also signed an agreement with Raspberry Pi that will enable us to further expand our offering. This collaboration has already led to the development of SECO Pi Vision 10.1 CM5, an innovative human-machine industrial interface that integrates perfectly with Raspberry Pi software.

Our Clea business has also continued to grow, and strategic alliances with global leaders like NXP and Nayax have helped consolidate our market leadership, enabling us to offer integrated payment solutions and advanced edge AI capabilities. With NXP in particular, we are working to provide a unified solution that will make the Clea IoT platform available to all users of NXP chips as well as perfectly integrated with the EdgeLock 2GO security services. With Nayax, we have established a partnership to integrate our IoT software suite with their payment platform to create an all-in-one solution that reduces operating costs and simplifies adoption by OEMs.

We have remained focused on our long-term objectives, and we have continued investing in innovation, thereby creating the conditions to better pursue future growth. Our ability to adapt to our constantly evolving marketplace and to take advantage of our technological expertise has been essential in maintaining our competitive advantage.

We are more enthusiastic than ever before for the opportunities that await us. SECO’s unique strategic and technological positioning enables us to offer end-to-end solutions – from modules to full systems, from human-machine interfaces (HMIs) to an integrated software platform – so we are in a privileged position to capitalize on the strong growth expected in industrial IoT over the coming years. Beginning in 2025, we are already expecting to see a return to revenue growth, supported by a solid portfolio of new projects and design wins, as well as by the increasing adoption of the Clea IoT software suite. Our focus will remain on providing innovative solutions that meet the evolving needs of our customers, while creating value for our shareholders. The pipeline of new products for 2025 includes more than 15 high[1]performance hardware solutions with a particular emphasis on boosting computing capacity on the edge. We firmly believe that the future of the industrial sector lies in running inference models locally by taking advantage of processing capacity directly on the edge. This new family of hardware, together with our soon-to-be-released Clea AI Studio module, perfectly positions us to be the ideal technology partner for our customers in the realm of AI.

We would like to take this opportunity to express our sincerest gratitude to our shareholders, our employees, and our partners. Your constant support and trust have been crucial to the results we have achieved. Our successes of 2024 would not have been possible without the dedication and commitment of our highly talented team. We are incredibly proud of what we have built together, and we are confident that we will continue to achieve important milestones in the years to come.

In conclusion, 2024 was a challenging year, but it was also a year of real progress for SECO, and we remain focused on creating value for all our stakeholders and on pursuing innovation in industrial IoT.

Sincerely,
Daniele Conti e Massimo Mauri

(Chairman and Chief Executive Officer)