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ThyssenKrupp Reports Results for Fiscal 1st Quarter

02/14/2008 - ThyssenKrupp reports earnings before taxes of €646 million for the first quarter of 2007/2008, with order intake and sales reaching the same high levels as in the prior-year quarter.

ThyssenKrupp reported earnings before taxes amounted to €646 million the first quarter of 2007/2008, in line with expectations. Before major nonrecurring items EBT was €715 million. The company said that order intake and sales reached the same high levels as in the prior-year quarter.
 
Profits were higher than planned but, as expected, lower than a year earlier. The prior-year quarter was boosted by particularly strong demand and very high base prices for stainless steel, neither of which were repeated in this most recent quarter for the Stainless and Services segments.
 
“For 2007/2008 we forecast earnings before taxes and major nonrecurring items—including project costs for the steel mills in Brazil and the USA—of over €3 billion,” said Executive Board Chairman Dr. Ekkehard Schulz. “For our Steel segment we expect 2008 to be another good steel year. The signs for this on the market have been increasing recently. We also expect continued lively demand and a significant improvement in prices in the Stainless segment. Our Technologies segment has orders in hand of around €16 billion, which will provide high earnings quality for some years to come. At Elevator we expect earnings to remain solid among other things on account of the business’s high share of services. And in the Services segment we are profiting from good demand and increasing prices for materials and services in particular as a result of infrastructure building in the growth regions of the world. As things stand at present, we expect sales of €53 billion in the current fiscal year.”
 
ThyssenKrupp’s mid-term sales target is €60 billion, while the mid-term goal for sustainable earnings before taxes and major nonrecurring items is €4 billion. In the longer term—especially after the startup of the steel mills of Steel and Stainless in North America and the investments of the other segments in other regions—ThyssenKrupp aims to achieve sales of around €65 billion and earnings before taxes and major nonrecurring items of €4.5 to 5.0 billion.
 
For its fiscal first quarter 2007/2008, ThyssenKrupp’s order intake was €13.3 billion, equal to the prior-year quarter. Sales were €12.3 billion, again the same as in the prior-year quarter.
 
EBITDA was €1,083 million, which compares with EBITDA of €1,507 million in the prior year. Earnings before taxes reached €646 million, compared with €1,062 million in the prior-year quarter. Earnings per share came to €0.85, compared with €1.31 in the prior-year quarter.
 
The Group’s net financial liabilities at December 31, 2007 were €859 million, representing an increase of €1,082 million compared with September 30, 2007, when net financial receivables of €223 million were reported. This increase is roughly the same as the change in the prior-year quarter, when there was an increase of €1,138 million.