Drägerwerk AG & Co KGaA (DGWPF) Full Year 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

2025-03-31 12:52:38 ET

Drägerwerk AG & Co KGaA (DGWPF)

Full Year 2024 Earnings Conference Call

March 31, 2025 9:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Stefan Dräger – Chief Executive Officer

Gert-Hartwig Lescow – Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Oliver Reinberg – Kepler Cheuvreux

Christian Ehmann – Warburg Research

Alexander Galitsa – HAIB

Harald Hof – mwb research

Virendra Chauhan – AlphaValue

Presentation

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Drägerwerk’s Full Year 2024 Earnings Conference Call. I’m Sandra, the Chorus Call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants have been in listen-only and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. [Operator Instructions] The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast.

At this time it’s my pleasure to hand over to Stefan Dräger, CEO. Please go ahead, sir.

Stefan Dräger

Yes, Good afternoon and thank you for joining our conference call on our financial results for the fiscal year 2024. I have with me today Gert-Hartwig Lescow, CFO; as well as Tom Fischler and Nikolaus Hammerschmidt, both Investor Relations. We would like to take you through the results for the presentation that we made available on our webpage this morning. Following the presentation, we will open the floor to your questions.

Let’s get started on Page 5 with the business highlights. 2024 was a successful year for Dräger with a robust business performance and a significant improvement in profitability. While net sales were slightly below our expectations, we maintained a strong performance achieving around €3.4 billion matching the prior year’s figure. This is an outstanding achievement considering that we benefited from strong catch up effects in 2023 driven by the improved delivery capabilities and a surge in demand for ventilators in China.

And importantly, although business in China fell in 2024 by almost half to what it was in 2023, we successfully compensated its impact through substantial growth in the rest of the world, highlighting the resilience and adaptability of our business. Our EBIT increased by €28 million to €194 million, thanks to our operating business and also supported by one-off effects totaling around €22 million. With earnings growing stronger than net sales, our EBIT margin increased from 4.9% to 5.8% in the full year, ending just above our expectations.

Our order intake also developed positively and exceeded the high level of the prior year at around €3.4 billion. This underlines the sustained demand for our Technology for Life and gives us confidence for the future. Following our dividend policy, we are going to distribute around 30% of group net profit to our shareholders, resulting in another dividend increase. I will come back to this topic at the end of our presentation....

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