GEAGF - GEA Group Aktiengesellschaft (GEAGF) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript
2024-05-14 01:50:10 ET
GEA Group Aktiengesellschaft (GEAGF)
Q1 2024 Results Earnings Conference Call
May 8, 2024, 08:00 AM ET
Company Participants
Oliver Luckenbach - Head of Investor Relations
Stefan Klebert - Chief Executive Officer
Bernd Brinker - Chief Financial Officer
Conference Call Participants
Klas Bergelind - Citi Investment Research (Europe)
Sven Weier - UBS Limited (Germany)
Sebastian Künne - RBC Capital Markets
Christoph Dolleschal - HSBC Trinkaus & Burkhardt AG
Sebastian Growe - Exane BNP Paribas
Presentation
Oliver Luckenbach
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for joining us today for our first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. With me on the call are Stefan Klebert, our CEO, and Bernd Brinker, our CFO. Stefan will begin today call with the highlights of the first quarter. Bernd will then cover the business and financial review before Stefan takes over again for the outlook 2024. Afterwards, up the call for the Q&A session.
Please be aware of the cautionary language that is included in our Safe Harbor statement as in the material that we have distributed today.
And with that, I hand over to Stefan.
Stefan Klebert
Thank you very much, Oliver. And good afternoon, everybody. It's my pleasure to welcome you to our conference call today.
Before I start with the highlights of the first quarter, I would like to congratulate Bernd to his contract extension. I'm sure you have read that. Last week, the supervisory board has decided to extend the appointment of Bernd as chief financial officer until end of June 27. I'm very pleased for this decision. And dear Bernd, I'm very much looking forward to continuing our excellent working relationship.
The market environment in the first quarter of 2024 has not materially changed since the last quarter of 2023. We are still facing high interest rates, negative FX development, and geopolitical uncertainties. But once again, we have delivered organic sales growth and a strong EBITDA margin expansion. We have continued our profitable growth journey.
In our last conference call, we indicated that order intake in the first quarter of 2024 will not match last year's record order intake in Q1, which was almost at €1.6 billion. The current decline in Q1 is therefore in line with our expectations. And since we are still seeing postponements of orders, order intake declined organically by 9.7%. On a reported basis, this decrease has been at 13.6% because of negative currency translation effects. However, sales rose organically by 2.7%, in line with our full year guidance of 2% to 4% organic sales growth. ...
GEA Group Aktiengesellschaft (GEAGF) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript