Dürr Aktiengesellschaft (DUERF) Preliminary Figures of 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

2025-03-06 14:51:16 ET

Dürr Aktiengesellschaft (DUERF)

Preliminary Figures of 2024 Earnings Conference Call

March 06, 2025 8:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Andreas Schaller – Head-Investor Relations

Jochen Weyrauch – Chief Executive Officer

Dietmar Heinrich – Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Felix Kröger – Hauck Aufhäuser Investment Banking

Christian Cohrs – Warburg Research

Nikita Lal – Deutsche Bank

Peter Rothenaicher – Baader Bank AG

Sven Maier – UBS

Holger Schmidt – DZ Bank AG

Presentation

Operator

Welcome to the Dürr Conference Call for the Preliminary Figures of 2024. I will now hand over to Andreas Schaller, Head of Investor Relations of Dürr AG.

Andreas Schaller

Thank you, Anna. Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon and good morning to those of you in the U.S. Welcome to our earnings conference call. With me on the call are our CEO, Jochen Weyrauch; and our CFO, Dietmar Heinrich. They will present the preliminary results for the financial year 2024 as well as the outlook for 2025 and we'll be happy to answer your questions afterwards. As always, our earnings presentation is available on our Investor Relations website and we assume that you have it in front of you. Please refer to our disclaimer regarding forward-looking statements on Slide 2.

And now it's my pleasure to hand over to our CEO, Jochen. Please go ahead.

Jochen Weyrauch

Thank you, Andreas. Welcome to all participants on this call from my side and thank you very much for joining. Let me start with some short remarks from the past year on Slide 3 before we go into detail. When we were talking with you 12 months ago, we promised to take actions to improve the Dürr Group's earnings resilience and portfolio and we have made some progress meanwhile. We achieved a solid operational performance in a challenging environment with a new order intake and sales record, an EBIT before extraordinary effects close to the upper end of the guidance and a strong free cash flow exceeding €100 million for the fifth year in a row. This was driven by operational improvements. I would like to highlight a couple of them.

The value before volume strategy and Paint and Final Assembly Systems pays off and we met our mid cycle margins targeted. Our environmental business achieved a record margin well driven by strong project execution. We successfully implemented our capacity reduction program at HOMAG. The targeted cost savings of €50 million will become fully visible in 2025. With respect to our portfolio, we took the capital market feedback seriously that our group structure was relatively complex. We decided to focus more on our core competency of automating production processes with a focus on high resource efficiency and cost savings for our customers. We call this sustainable automation. As a first step we sold the filling business of Agramkow. Then we merged Paint and Final Assembly Systems and Application Technology in the new automotive division.

Moreover, we put our environmental business for sale as it is not directly involved in the value-add process of our customers. This process is progressing well and we are on track to reduce the number of divisions from five to only three after it will be completed. Last but not least, we updated our climate strategy and set our emission reduction target to 30% by 2035 in line with the 1.5 degrees goal. As the environmental business is held for sale, we will show it as discontinued operation in our upcoming annual report. This also has an impact on the agenda of today's presentation that is shown on Slide 4.

We will first present the highlights, the divisional performance and the financials for the Dürr Group as a whole in order to make it as comparable as possible to our guidance and past reporting. In addition, we will also show the financials of the continued operations and the divisional performance according to the new divisional setup. In the outlook, we will look at both the Dürr Group as a whole as well as the continued operations. We hope that this provides enough transparency for you....

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