VAT Group AG (VACN.SW) - Deep Dive Research Report

Sector: Industrials (functionally a semiconductor capital-equipment supplier) | Listing: SIX Swiss Exchange | HQ: Haag, Switzerland | Report date: 26 June 2026

1. What the Company Does

VAT Group makes the valves that let a vacuum exist where a chip is born. Almost every step in manufacturing an advanced semiconductor happens inside a vacuum chamber, because depositing atom-thin films, etching nanometre features, or implanting ions only works when there is essentially no air in the way. To move a wafer from one chamber to the next, to seal a chamber off, or to precisely throttle the pressure inside it while gases flow, you need a mechanical valve that can open and close millions of times, hold an extremely tight seal, shed no particles, and survive corrosive plasmas - all while being controlled to within a fraction of a percent. VAT designs and builds those valves, and it does so better than anyone else on earth, holding roughly 75% of the market for vacuum valves used in semiconductor production.

The company was founded in 1965 by Siegfried Schertler in Flawil, Switzerland, and moved to Haag in the St. Gallen Rhine Valley that same year. It began as a maker of vacuum sealing technology for industrial and research use. The pivotal decision came in 1988, when VAT entered the semiconductor market - the application that now defines it. As chipmaking grew more vacuum-intensive with each technology node, VAT rode that wave, later adding flat-panel display and photovoltaic applications after 2000. Capvis and Partners Group bought the company in 2014 and floated it on the SIX Swiss Exchange in 2016; the private-equity sponsors have since exited and VAT is now widely held.

The core value proposition is reliability at the limit of physics. A modern logic or memory fab runs thousands of process tools, and an unplanned valve failure can halt a chamber, scrap wafers, and cost the fab far more than the valve itself. Customers - the equipment makers like Applied Materials, Lam Research, ASML and Tokyo Electron, and the chipmakers who run the tools - care about uptime, particle cleanliness, sealing integrity and how long a valve lasts before it needs service. VAT competes on engineering, not price.

What makes the product hard is the combination of demands that normally trade off against each other. A gate valve on an etch chamber must open and close potentially tens of millions of cycles, seal to ultra-high-vacuum tightness every single time, generate almost no particles (a single stray particle can ruin a leading-edge chip), tolerate aggressive process chemistries, and do all of this while being actuated in a fraction of a second and held to fine motion tolerances. VAT's edge is decades of accumulated know-how in materials, bellows design, sealing surfaces, motion control and the manufacturing discipline to make these things repeatably. That knowledge is not in a textbook; it is embedded in the company's process engineers and its installed base.

A concrete example: when a chipmaker installs a new deposition tool, VAT's valves sit between the wafer-handling robot and each process chamber and on the vacuum-pumping lines. VAT typically wins this position years earlier, during the tool's design phase, when the equipment maker's engineers specify which valve goes where - a "spec win." Once specified into a tool platform, VAT's valve is qualified, designed into the tool's geometry and control software, and ships with every copy of that tool the equipment maker sells. Years later, when the valve eventually wears, the fab buys VAT's original spare parts and upgrades through Global Service. The spec win is the seed; the installed base is the annuity.

2. Business Segments

VAT reports two financial segments - Valves (about 82% of 2024 sales) and Global Service (about 18%) - but management runs and discusses the business as three units: Semiconductors, Advanced Industrials, and Global Service. I treat all three below because that is how the value is actually created and how every concall is structured.

Semiconductors (the engine, ~two-thirds of group sales)

This is VAT's heart. It supplies vacuum valves for the tools that deposit, etch, implant, clean and inspect wafers - the front-end of chip manufacturing. The customers are the wafer-fab-equipment (WFE) makers and, increasingly, the leading-edge logic and memory fabs themselves. Demand is driven by how vacuum-intensive each new technology node is: as transistors shrink and 3D structures (gate-all-around logic, high-layer-count 3D NAND, advanced DRAM, HBM stacking) proliferate, the number of vacuum steps per wafer rises, which means more valves per tool and more tools. Management calls this "vacuum intensity," and it is why VAT's content can grow faster than wafer volumes.

The core capability is the spec-win machine. VAT embeds with equipment makers' R&D teams to get its valves designed into next-generation tool platforms. In FY2025 it recorded 150 specification wins, up 14% year-on-year, roughly half of them on leading-edge applications (FY2025 results, 3 March 2026). Winning a spec is a multi-year engineering relationship; once won, it is extremely sticky because re-qualifying an alternative valve on a production tool is costly and risky.

Competitively this is the segment where VAT is strongest - its ~75% share in semiconductor vacuum valves is a structural lead. It wins on the highest-end, most demanding applications (leading-edge logic and memory, EUV-adjacent vacuum environments) where reliability and particle performance dominate purchasing. It is more exposed in lower-end, price-sensitive applications where in-house or regional valve makers can compete. Management consistently frames this as the group's growth bet, levered to the WFE cycle.

Advanced Industrials (the diversifier and cyclical ballast)

This unit (historically labelled "Display, Solar & Industrials" or "Advanced Industries") supplies vacuum valves for flat-panel display manufacturing, photovoltaic/solar cell production, vacuum coating, and a long tail of scientific, research and general-industrial vacuum applications - particle accelerators, analytical instruments, coating lines, and similar. End markets are more fragmented and the technical bar is generally lower than leading-edge semi, though some research applications (e.g. synchrotron and fusion vacuum systems) are highly demanding.

It exists separately because the customers, buying cycles and economics differ from semiconductors: display and solar are their own capex cycles, and the industrial/research tail is project- and budget-driven. Its strategic role is diversification and counter-cyclical ballast. In Q3 2025, when semiconductor orders were soft (-14% quarter-on-quarter), Advanced Industrials orders rose sharply quarter-on-quarter, partly offsetting the weakness (Q3 2025 call, October 2025). The flip side: it is exposed to research-budget cuts, which management flagged as a FY2025 headwind. It is not the margin engine, but it smooths the ride.

Global Service (the annuity)

Global Service sells original spare parts, repairs, upgrades and local expert support to the installed base of VAT valves already running in fabs worldwide. Revenue grew 19% to about CHF 199 million in FY2025, helped by fab utilisation running near 100% in DRAM (FY2025 results, 3 March 2026) - the harder a fab runs its tools, the faster valves wear and need service.

The core capability here is the installed base itself plus a service footprint across 29 countries. No one else can service a VAT valve with genuine VAT parts and engineering, so the segment is effectively a closed, recurring market that grows as the installed base grows. It is the cash cow and the stabiliser: service demand is far less cyclical than new-equipment orders because fabs keep running tools through downturns. Management treats it as a structurally growing, higher-resilience revenue stream that compounds with every new tool VAT's valves ship into.

3. Products and Business Detail

VAT's catalogue is a family of high-vacuum valves and related motion/sealing components, each engineered for a specific role inside a vacuum system:

• Gate valves and transfer/isolation valves - large-aperture valves that open to let a wafer pass between chambers, then seal the chamber to vacuum. These are the highest-cycle, highest-reliability products and the backbone of the semiconductor business.
• Control / throttle / pendulum valves - valves that precisely regulate pressure inside a chamber while process gases flow, by partially opening to control conductance. These demand fine, repeatable motion control and are central to deposition and etch process stability.
• Vacuum modules and integrated solutions - assemblies that combine valves with actuators and controls for specific tool architectures.
• Edge-welded bellows - flexible metal components that allow motion while maintaining a vacuum seal; a core enabling technology VAT manufactures in-house and a key reason its valves seal reliably over millions of cycles.
• Service products - genuine spare parts, refurbishment, and field upgrades delivered through Global Service.

These products go into essentially every vacuum process tool: physical and chemical vapour deposition (PVD/CVD), atomic-layer deposition (ALD), plasma etch, ion implantation, and the vacuum environments adjacent to EUV lithography, plus display and solar coaters and research vacuum systems. What makes them hard to make is the layering of requirements - ultra-high-vacuum sealing, near-zero particle generation, chemical resistance, fast and precise actuation, and tens of millions of maintenance-free cycles - which together require deep materials and process know-how rather than off-the-shelf engineering. Qualification is rigorous: a valve must be tested and approved on a customer's tool before it ships in volume, which is the basis of the spec-win moat.

Manufacturing is concentrated in three sites. Haag, Switzerland is the headquarters, R&D centre, and home of the highest-end and most complex production; roughly half of VAT's ~3,200 employees work in Switzerland. Penang, Malaysia (since 2018, with capacity expanded through 2025) handles higher-volume production closer to Asian customers. Arad, Romania is the newest plant, opened in June 2025, adding European capacity for the anticipated upturn (Q3 2025 call, October 2025). VAT spent a record CHF 75 million (about 7% of sales) on innovation in FY2025.

Geographically, Asia is the dominant market at roughly 67% of net sales, the Americas about 19%, and EMEA about 14% - a footprint that tracks where chips and chipmaking tools are built. VAT sells through direct relationships and maintains representation in 29 countries, with the service network being a key part of its physical presence.

4. Customers

VAT sells to two layers of the same supply chain. The first and largest is the wafer-fab-equipment makers - Applied Materials, Lam Research, Tokyo Electron, ASML and their peers - who build the process tools and design VAT's valves into them. The second is the chipmakers themselves (leading-edge logic foundries, DRAM/HBM and NAND memory makers), who buy service, spares and some valves directly and whose fab utilisation drives Global Service demand.

The buying decision is made by the equipment maker's design and process engineers during a tool's development, not by procurement on price. Their criteria are reliability, particle performance, cycle life, actuation precision and the supplier's ability to co-engineer to the tool's geometry and control system. The sales cycle is long - a spec win can precede volume revenue by years - which is exactly why it is so valuable once secured.

Switching costs are high and multi-layered. A valve is qualified on a specific tool; replacing it means re-qualification testing, redesigning the tool's mechanical and software interfaces, and accepting the risk that a new valve underperforms in production where downtime is enormously expensive. Once VAT is designed into a tool platform, it tends to ship with every unit of that platform for the platform's life, and then generates service revenue for years afterward. This is installed-base lock-in reinforced by qualification lock-in.

Customer concentration is real - the WFE industry is itself concentrated among a handful of giants - but management frames it as a reflection of quality rather than fragility, because VAT is specified across multiple platforms at every major customer. Revenue structure is a mix of order-driven equipment sales (cyclical, tied to the WFE capex cycle and visible through book-to-bill and order backlog) and recurring Global Service (steadier). The order book gives some forward visibility; at Q1 2026 the backlog had risen 42% to about CHF 431 million with a book-to-bill of roughly 1.6x (Q1 2026 trading update, 16 April 2026).

5. Competitive Landscape

The market for high-end vacuum valves in semiconductor manufacturing is unusually concentrated, and VAT sits at the top of it with roughly 75% share. The structure is best understood as VAT plus a set of broader vacuum/instrumentation companies for whom valves are one product line among many, plus regional and in-house alternatives at the lower end.

The most relevant named competitors:

• MKS Instruments - US-based, the broadest direct competitor through its vacuum solutions and HPS valve products; large and well-resourced, it competes across pressure-control and valve products and invests heavily in R&D.
• Pfeiffer Vacuum (part of Germany's Busch Group, taken private) - strong in vacuum technology broadly, with a valve range serving research, analytics and industry; a more credible competitor in Advanced Industrials than in leading-edge semi.
• ULVAC - Japan's large vacuum-equipment maker, strong in Asia and in display/coating applications.
• Agilent Technologies - US-based, present in vacuum products mainly via its analytical-instrument heritage; peripheral to leading-edge semi valves.

VAT wins against all of these on the highest-end semiconductor applications, where its accumulated reliability and particle-performance know-how and its entrenched spec-win positions are hard to dislodge. Where it is more exposed is the lower-spec, price-sensitive end and in Advanced Industrials, where broader vacuum players and regional makers compete more effectively.

(Market caps are approximate peer-size references as of June 2026 and move daily; they are not valuation inputs.)

Barriers to entry are high but not absolute. The moat is built from decades of materials and sealing know-how, the qualification and spec-win lock-in described above, an installed-base service annuity, and the manufacturing discipline to produce particle-clean valves repeatably. A new entrant would need years of co-engineering with WFE makers and a clean qualification track record before a fab would trust its valve on a production tool. The realistic competitive threat is therefore not a startup but a large, well-capitalised vacuum player like MKS chipping at specific applications, or customers' in-house programmes at the commodity end. The structural shift to watch is the geopolitical fragmentation of the chip supply chain (China building domestic WFE and component supply), which could nurture regional valve competitors over time. VAT's exposure is its high dependence on the WFE capex cycle and on a concentrated set of large customers; its strength is that it is the default choice wherever vacuum performance is critical.

6. Industry

Demand for VAT's products is ultimately a derivative of two things: how many chips the world builds, and how vacuum-intensive each new generation of chips is. The second matters more than the first. Each technology node - gate-all-around logic transistors, ever-taller 3D NAND stacks, advanced DRAM and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for AI accelerators - adds more vacuum process steps per wafer, which raises the number and value of valves per tool. This "vacuum intensity" lets VAT's served market grow structurally faster than raw wafer output, and it is the central bull thesis management returns to on every call.

The proximate demand driver is wafer-fab-equipment (WFE) spending, which is itself driven by the capex decisions of foundries and memory makers responding to AI compute demand, data-centre buildout, and the hyperscalers' investment plans. Management cited over US$300 billion of hyperscaler cloud-investment commitments as a tailwind feeding through to leading-edge chip capex (Q1 2025 trading update, April 2025). VAT sits near the top of this supply chain as a critical component supplier: its valves go into the tools before the tools go into the fabs before the fabs make the chips.

The industry is cyclical, and that cyclicality is the defining feature of VAT's business. WFE spending moves in multi-year waves of overbuild and digestion. 2024 and most of 2025 were a muted, digesting phase for VAT's semiconductor orders; management repeatedly described the period as "muted" and pushed the expected ramp out, before order intake inflected sharply higher into early 2026. Global Service is the counter-cyclical cushion within this - fabs keep running and servicing tools even when they stop buying new ones.

On size and growth, third-party market research puts VAT as the clear leader of the vacuum-valve market (estimates of its overall vacuum-valve share around a third, and ~75% in the semiconductor sub-segment specifically), with the top five players - VAT, MKS, ULVAC, Pfeiffer and Agilent - holding roughly half the broader market. The market grows in line with WFE and vacuum intensity over a cycle.

Regulation enters mainly through export controls: restrictions on advanced chipmaking equipment to China shape where tools and components can be sold, and the broader reshoring of fabs (US CHIPS Act, European and Asian fab incentives) reshuffles the geography of demand. There is no product-approval regime in the pharmaceutical sense, but customer qualification functions as a private equivalent. The currency backdrop is a structural headwind specific to VAT: it manufactures heavily in Switzerland and reports in Swiss francs while selling largely in US dollars and into Asia, so a strong franc compresses reported orders, sales and margins - a recurring theme through 2025.

7. Growth Triggers

Drawn only from the six reporting-period calls (FY2024 to Q1 2026):

• Semiconductor order ramp inflecting now. Q1 2026 orders of CHF 356 million were the second-highest ever, up 47% year-on-year and 17% sequentially, with Semiconductors orders up 38% quarter-on-quarter and 65% year-on-year (Q1 2026 trading update, 16 April 2026). Management ties this to "unprecedented demand for leading-edge logic and memory chip manufacturing tools."

  "Q1 orders of CHF 356 million ... the second highest order intake VAT has ever recorded ... Semiconductors orders up 65% year-on-year on the back of unprecedented demand for leading-edge logic and memory chip manufacturing tools." (Q1 2026 trading update, 16 April 2026)

• Record wafer-fab-equipment spending expected in 2026 and 2027. Management projected the cyclical upturn to strengthen from late 2026, with record WFE spending in 2026 and 2027 (Q3 2025 call, October 2025) - a view that the Q1 2026 order surge began to validate.

• Order backlog rebuilding gives forward visibility. Backlog up 42% to about CHF 431 million with book-to-bill around 1.6x at Q1 2026 (Q1 2026 trading update, 16 April 2026), supporting revenue conversion through 2026.

• Romania (Arad) plant commissioned and capacity ready. The Arad factory opened in June 2025 and Malaysia capacity was expanded, so VAT is "ready and set for the growth" without a capacity constraint into the upturn (Q3 2025 call, October 2025; repeated theme from H1 2025).

  "We have expanded our capacity in Malaysia. We just opened up our Romania factory in June. So we are ready and set for the growth as well." (Q3 2025 call, October 2025)

• Rising vacuum intensity and spec wins lifting content per tool. 150 specification wins in FY2025, up 14%, roughly half on leading-edge applications, after 61 in H1 2025 (up 27%) (FY2025 results, 3 March 2026; H1 2025 call, 23 July 2025) - the leading indicator of future content gains.

• Global Service compounding on near-full fab utilisation. Service revenue up 19% in FY2025 with DRAM fab utilisation near 100% (FY2025 results, 3 March 2026), a structurally growing recurring stream.

• Advanced Industrials recovery. Strong sequential order growth in Advanced Industrials in Q3 2025 (up sharply quarter-on-quarter) provided diversification as semi was soft (Q3 2025 call, October 2025).

• 2026 guided higher across the board. Management guides full-year 2026 orders, sales, EBITDA, EBITDA margin, net income and free cash flow to all exceed 2025, reiterated even after the Q1 supply-chain hit (FY2025 results, 3 March 2026; Q1 2026 trading update, 16 April 2026).

8. Key Risks

• WFE cyclicality and ramp-timing risk. VAT's order book swings with the semiconductor capex cycle, and management has been wrong-footed on timing before (see Section 9). A pushed-out or weaker-than-expected upturn directly compresses orders and, with operating leverage, margins. This is a high-probability moderate-to-large drag, not a tail risk - it is the normal weather of the business. The mechanism is straightforward: when fabs and WFE makers pause tool orders, valve orders fall first and hardest.

• Swiss-franc strength. VAT's cost base is heavily in CHF while revenue is largely USD/Asia, so a strong franc mechanically reduces reported orders, sales and margins. This was a recurring, explicitly cited headwind through 2025 and a direct reason management cut its margin guidance.

  Management "had to abandon our previously given guidance for higher orders and a higher EBITDA margin" as softer semi demand "and the persisting FX challenges became too big a hurdle." (Q3 2025 call, October 2025)

• Customer and supply-chain concentration. The WFE industry is concentrated in a handful of giants; losing share on a major tool platform, or a downturn at one large customer, would hit disproportionately. The Q1 2026 episode also showed concentration on the input side: a geopolitical supply-chain disruption (Middle East conflict) delayed revenue recognition and pushed Q1 2026 sales down 20% year-on-year even as orders surged (Q1 2026 trading update, 16 April 2026). Demand was fine; VAT simply could not ship - a vivid reminder that supply-chain fragility can decouple sales from orders in a given quarter.

• Geopolitical and export-control fragmentation. Restrictions on advanced equipment to China, and the broader regionalisation of the chip supply chain, could both dampen a slice of demand and, over time, foster domestic Chinese valve competitors at the lower end. Probability is moderate; impact is slow-burning rather than sudden.

• Margin disappointment from the corridor's low end. Management runs to a 30-37% EBITDA-margin corridor and landed FY2025 at the bottom (30.0%). If FX stays adverse or the volume ramp under-delivers operating leverage, margins can sit at the low end longer than the market expects, even in an up-cycle.

• High payout, modest balance-sheet buffer. VAT distributes nearly all free cash flow as dividends (FY2025 payout ~93% of FCF) and carries net debt (CHF 262m at mid-2025, ~0.81x LTM EBITDA). The leverage is low, but the combination of a capital-intensive ramp, a high payout and cyclical cash flows leaves little slack if a downturn coincides with capex.

9. Walk the Talk

The six reporting periods analysed: FY2024 results (4 March 2025); Q1 2025 trading update (April 2025); H1 2025 results (23 July 2025); Q3 2025 results (October 2025); FY2025 results (3 March 2026); Q1 2026 trading update (16 April 2026). The most recent is within ~70 days of this report.

The arc of these six calls is a clear study in a management team that is directionally honest but was repeatedly too optimistic on near-term ramp timing - and then delivered when the cycle finally turned.

At FY2024 (March 2025), management set the frame for the year: it expected semiconductor-equipment investment to "grow further over the course of 2025" and guided full-year 2025 orders, sales, EBITDA, EBITDA margin, net income and free cash flow all higher than 2024, with capex of CHF 90-100 million. At Q1 2025 (April 2025), the tone stayed constructive - sales up 39% year-on-year on backlog execution - though orders were soft sequentially and management acknowledged "uncertainty on timing of the market ramp amid geopolitical headwinds." The hedge was already there, but the expectation was a 2025 ramp.

By H1 2025 (July 2025), the operational story looked strong: sales up 24%, EBITDA up 22%, a record 61 spec wins (up 27%), and management leaning into the structural vacuum-intensity narrative. The market was reading this as confirmation that the upturn was arriving.

Then came the reset. At Q3 2025 (October 2025), management explicitly abandoned its own guidance for higher orders and a higher EBITDA margin:

"We had to abandon our previously given guidance for higher orders and a higher EBITDA margin as the softer than anticipated semi business and the persisting FX challenges became too big a hurdle to cross ... we now expect [the EBITDA margin] to be at the lower end of the margin corridor band of 30% to 37%." (Q3 2025 call, October 2025)

This is the clearest "miss" in the set. The semiconductor recovery management had implied for 2025 did not materialise that year; Q3 semi orders fell 14% sequentially, and the ramp was pushed to "late 2026 and 2027." To their credit, they said so plainly rather than burying it, and Advanced Industrials and Global Service strength cushioned the blow.

At FY2025 (March 2026), the team delivered a split result against the original FY2024 promise. Sales (+14%), net income and free cash flow (a record CHF 230m) all came in higher than 2024 - kept promises. But group orders were essentially flat year-on-year (semi orders down ~5%) and the EBITDA margin landed at 30.0%, the very bottom of the corridor - the missed parts. So the "higher on all metrics" pledge from a year earlier was only partly honoured: cash and sales yes, orders and margin no. Notably, management did not pretend otherwise.

At Q1 2026 (April 2026), the long-promised ramp finally showed up in the order book: CHF 356 million of orders, the second-highest ever, up 47% year-on-year, with semiconductor orders up 65%. The credibility wrinkle here was on sales, not orders - a Middle East supply-chain disruption delayed shipments and pushed Q1 sales down 20%, a genuinely exogenous miss rather than a demand problem, and management reiterated full-year 2026 guidance for records.

The plain assessment: this is a credible, candid management team on the things within its control - it delivered record cash flow, it built capacity on time, and it owns its misses out loud rather than spinning them. Its weakness is forecasting the cycle's timing, where it leaned optimistic through early 2025 and had to walk guidance back. An investor should trust VAT's operational delivery and its honesty, while discounting its near-term ramp-timing calls and treating the 30-37% margin corridor's low end as the realistic base when FX is adverse.

10. Shareholder Friendliness Index

Dividends. VAT held its dividend flat at CHF 6.25 per share for the dividends paid on fiscal 2022, 2023 and 2024 (the AGM in 2025 approved an unchanged CHF 6.25), then raised it 12% to CHF 7.00 per share for fiscal 2025, approved at the April 2026 AGM. The policy is explicitly cash-driven: the CHF 7.00 represents roughly 93% of FY2025 free cash flow and about 98% of EPS (CHF 7.15), so VAT pays out nearly everything it earns and generates in cash. That very high payout is the company's deliberate model rather than a warning sign - it is a high-return, capital-light franchise that returns its cash rather than hoarding it - but it does mean the dividend will flex with cyclical cash flow rather than being held artificially flat through a deep downturn (sources: VAT AGM 2025 release; FY2025 results, 3 March 2026; VAT dividend history).

Buybacks and dilution. No MoatMap data block was supplied for this report, so the last-90-day window is not separately evidenced here. On the longer history, VAT has not run a material share-repurchase programme over the last three years; its capital return has been delivered almost entirely through the dividend, consistent with a payout ratio near 100% of free cash flow that leaves little room for buybacks. The share count has been broadly stable, with only minor movement from management equity plans rather than a deliberate shrink-the-count strategy; the board carries standing authority within its capital band to issue or buy back shares (valid to May 2026) but has used it sparingly. I could not verify a specific authorised-versus-executed buyback figure, so I note its apparent absence rather than asserting a number.

Verdict: Returns Capital - VAT distributes nearly all of its free cash flow as a growing dividend, the single clearest signal of a management that returns capital rather than hoards it, albeit via dividends not buybacks.

11. Insider Activities

Switzerland's insider-disclosure regime (Art. 56 SIX Listing Rules, via the SIX Exchange Regulation management-transactions register) publishes management transactions in an anonymised form - it discloses the reporting person's function (e.g. board member, executive) and the transaction, but not the individual's name - which limits how granularly Swiss insider activity can be attributed compared with US Form 4 or UK RNS filings.

After querying the SIX Exchange Regulation management-transactions register and searching news and aggregator sources, no material management transactions for VAT Group were located within the last 12 months in the live SIX register snapshot. The register's recent-window feed returned transactions for other SIX-listed issuers (Galenica, Holcim, Inficon, Implenia and others) but none for VAT Group during the period checked. This indicates an absence of reportable open-market buying or selling by VAT directors and executives of a size that surfaced in the register window, rather than a data-access failure - but I flag that the SIX register's public feed is a rolling recent window, so older individual filings within the 12 months may exist that were not retrievable here.

What can be stated with confidence from primary disclosures:

• No cluster of insider buying or selling was identified - neither bullish open-market accumulation by the CEO/CFO/board nor a wave of insider selling.
• Board continuity rather than transactions dominated the governance news flow: Clara-Ann Gordon and Michael (Mike) Allison - the former CEO - were elected to the board in April 2025 and re-elected April 2026; Urs Gantner has been CEO since January 2024; Martin Komischke remains chairman.

Net assessment. With no disclosed material insider buys or sells located in the window, the insider signal is neutral. There is no conviction open-market purchase to read as bullish, and equally no insider selling to read as a concern. Given the anonymised Swiss regime and the rolling nature of the public register, a reader wanting a definitive picture should consult the SIX Exchange Regulation management-transactions register directly for VAT Group's full filing history.

12. Scenarios

Bull case. The semiconductor up-cycle that VAT's Q1 2026 order surge signalled turns into a sustained, multi-year boom. AI-driven demand keeps leading-edge logic foundries and HBM/DRAM makers building and upgrading fabs at record pace, and each new node is more vacuum-intensive than the last, so VAT's content per tool keeps climbing on top of rising tool volumes. The 150-plus annual spec wins convert into shipping revenue across 2026 and 2027, the rebuilt backlog and 1.6x book-to-bill flush through to record sales, and the Romania and Malaysia capacity that management built ahead of the curve absorbs the volume without bottlenecks. With volume leverage and a calmer franc, the EBITDA margin climbs back toward the top of the 30-37% corridor. Global Service compounds quietly underneath as near-full fab utilisation wears valves faster. Free cash flow sets new records and the dividend keeps stepping up. VAT looks like exactly what it is - the indispensable, ~75%-share toll-taker on every vacuum step in advanced chipmaking - and the market treats the early-2025 ramp delay as a forgotten air-pocket.

Base case. Management delivers roughly what it has guided. 2026 comes in higher than 2025 on orders, sales, EBITDA, margin, net income and free cash flow, as promised, with the Q1 supply-chain disruption proving a timing dent rather than a lost-demand event - the delayed shipments recognise later in the year. The semiconductor ramp is real but uneven, with quarter-to-quarter lumpiness in orders and the franc remaining a periodic headwind that keeps the margin nearer the middle of the corridor than the top. Advanced Industrials provides ballast, Global Service grows steadily, and capex stays in the CHF 70-100 million range to support the upturn. VAT continues to return nearly all its free cash flow as a growing dividend. The story is a high-quality cyclical compounder doing what it does, neither dramatically beating nor breaking.

Bear case. The Q1 2026 order spike proves to be a pull-forward or an inventory build rather than the start of a durable ramp, and WFE spending digests again into 2027 - a repeat of the 2025 disappointment management already had to admit once. The franc stays strong, pinning the EBITDA margin at the bottom of the corridor even as volumes recover, so the operating leverage the bulls expect never fully shows up. Geopolitical fragmentation deepens: export controls clip a slice of demand and, more slowly, China's push for domestic WFE and component self-sufficiency nurtures regional valve competitors that erode VAT's share at the lower end. Supply-chain shocks like the one that hit Q1 2026 shipments recur, decoupling sales from orders and frustrating revenue conversion. With a payout near 100% of free cash flow, a cyclical air-pocket forces the dividend to flex down, and a management team already caught leaning too optimistic on timing loses some of the credibility it spent 2025 rebuilding. None of this breaks the franchise - the moat is intact - but it turns a hoped-for boom into a long, frustrating wait.