GĂ©rald Streit0:00
People say 'Delfingen' or 'Delfingen'... Delfingen is the name of the village where my family originates from in German-speaking Switzerland. We kept that little name.
Hello, my name is Gérald Streit. I am the owner-manager of Delfingen. It's a company founded in 1954 by my grandfather, manufacturing components for electrical wiring harnesses. It has two major business segments: a historical one in automotive, and one that has been strongly diversified in recent years into industrial sectors — from robotics to renewable energies.
It's the men and women of Delfingen, our entire culture. This is very important because we are strongly international — we're in 22 countries, we have 21 languages within the company. It's the ability to coordinate and be solidarity-driven with all our teams to face the highly variable and fluctuating demands of clients in these countries. No single client represents more than 8% of our revenue, which gives us a great deal of freedom — no dependency.
Our headquarters is in Dannemarie — not Hauteuille — Dannemarie, in the middle of the Besançon-Belfort-Franche-Comté axis. We're about 30 km from the Swiss border, 40 km from the German border, in a small village of 600 inhabitants, and we have about 250 people at headquarters.
I joined in February 1996. At that time, the company had 150 people, and the goal was to raise funds for external growth development, particularly on the American continent. This was achieved in 1998 with the acquisition of two competitors, because the automotive market was mainly American at the end of the 1990s.
Over the last three years we've had very strong growth — we nearly tripled our revenue in four years, doubled it in three years. We've always had strong growth over these 20 years, mainly through external growth. The objective was really to gain geographical market share, since our clients are very international and dispersed — the first to establish in a country captured the market and its margin potential.
In the last three years, we had the opportunity to acquire our main German competitor, which allowed us to move from 4th position worldwide to 1st position worldwide. We're currently at approximately 460 million euros in revenue for 2023, compared to about 215 million in 2019, before the COVID crisis.
Given this strong growth and further acquisitions last year, we've really maximized the leverage of debt. So the objective over the next two years, through end of 2026, is to have a consolidation period for deleveraging, with a strong focus on cash and debt, so we can resume a phase of external growth starting in 2026, particularly in industrial markets.
We have a track record of roughly one external acquisition every 14 months, so this will be the first time we have such a long plateau period, but it's necessary given the elements of these recent years.
If I'm an investor who likes companies with a real ethical business — transforming materials for 70 years, with real environmental and social responsibility through our history and culture — I think Delfingen is a good investment, especially in these troubled periods where our valuation suffers a significant discount due to our small-cap position and our leverage ratio of 3, which should improve in the coming two years.
A three-to-four-year investment, nice and steady. I invite investors interested in this opportunity to visit our website or our YouTube page, where you'll find quite a few videos about our actions — notably our foundation, the company's history, and our corporate culture — which will help to back up these statements.
