After achieving and exceeding its guidance last year thanks to strong revenue and earnings performance in the fourth quarter, the Koenig & Bauer group remains on track to meet its targets for 2018, underpinned by a high order backlog and a well filled project pipeline. In addition to good group-wide capacity utilisation, the progress that has been made in the projects for achieving further EBIT gains by 2021 is providing a solid basis. Service revenue climbed from €67.4 million in the previous year to €71.8 million in the first quarter of 2018.
At €250.9 million, group order intake in the first three months of 2018 was down on the previous year’s figure of €321.5 million, which had been influenced by a major security project. CEO Claus Bolza-Schünemann comments,
“Alongside our expansionary service business, we made further progress in the flourishing packaging printing. With our customer-centric solutions, we were able to increase order intake in cartonboard and film printing, metal decorating, marking and coding printing. As expected, demand for digital printing presses was subdued.”
Group revenue (€217.3 million) and EBIT (–€1.9 million) were down on the previous year (€259.1m and €5m) in Q1. CFO Mathias Dähn says, “Due to the delivery dates requested by our customers, press installations in 2018 will be concentrating on the second half of the year and particularly Q4 to an even greater extent than last year.”
Order intake in the Sheetfed segment, which is dominated by packaging printing, rose by 5.3%. Ralf Sammeck, the management board member responsible for this segment comments, “After widening our share of the global market across all format classes in 2017, we expanded our market leadership in large formats in Q1 2018.”
