Koenig & Bauer has made a strong start to 2019, with Q1 revenue and orders increasing compared to the same period of last year.
The German company’s revenue was €230.7 million for the three-month period ending 31 March, up from €217.3 million in the equivalent period of 2018. Meanwhile its order intake increased by over 10%, from €250.9 million to €276.4 million. This growth was underpinned by significantly more orders for services and for folding carton, direct glass and security printing presses.
Earnings before Interest and Tax (EBIT) were still in negative territory however, coming to –€2.8 million, not far off the previous year’s figure of –€1.9 million. At –€4.9 million, group net earnings in the first quarter of 2019 translate into earnings per share of –€0.30.
News was generally good for specific parts of the business. Substantially higher orders for packaging printing presses caused order intake in the sheetfed segment to rise by 12.4% to €173.5 million. Likewise more orders for services and presses for security printing and direct glass decorating caused order intake in the special segment to increase by 37.7% to €80 million. However, despite the strong growth in service business, orders in digital and web came to €31.9 million, falling short of the previous year’s figure of €45.2 million due to lower orders for newspaper and flexible packaging printing presses.
‘The order backlog, which rose to €656.6 million as of 31 March 2019, gives us good forward visibility through to autumn 2019,’ said CFO Mathias Dähn. ‘On the strength of the good order and project situation ensuring full capacity utilisation across the entire group, as well as the further progress made in our group projects for boosting earnings by €70 million compared to 2016, we are confident to achieve organic growth of around 4% in revenue and an EBIT margin of around 6% for 2019 in the group.’
‘With our growth offensive 2023, we want to actively exploit the currently available market opportunities in the cardboard, corrugated board, flexible packaging, marking and coding, glass direct and decor printing as well as in postpress to achieve sustained profitable growth,’ added CEO Claus Bolza-Schünemann. ‘With all our initiatives and projects, we are targeting to increase group revenue to around €1.5 billion with an EBIT margin of between 7 % and 10% until 2023.’
