KSB to Increase Earnings by 2006
A "high earnings future" was the prospect which Chairman of the Board of Management Josef Gerstner held out to KSB shareholders at the Annual General Meeting on 7 June 2004 in Frankenthal for the coming years.
With this in mind, a structural programme has been put in place to ensure that competitiveness and profitability are improved by 2006. In parallel with this, a growth initiative is under way which aims to achieve profitable sales in a broader field of activities. A return on sales of five percent for 2006 is the target of the company, which supplies pumps, valves and related systems.
However, as Josef Gerstner explained, the structural programme will have a marked negative impact on the performance figures for 2004. As announced in April, efficiency enhancement measures also involve a reduction in the number of staff by the end of 2005. On 30 April 2004, the Group had 12,484 employees, 7285 of them in Europe.
In the first four months of the year, despite a difficult market situation, the KSB Group achieved a 6.3 percent increase in order intake and a sales plus of 6.5 percent compared with the same period last year. Most of this growth was seen in the Asia / Pacific companies and the European companies outside France and Germany. In Germany's KSB AG, the order intake declined by 1.5 percent up to April, while sales revenue increased by 2.7 percent over the same period.
The shareholders at the Annual General Meeting approved a dividend of € 2.50 per ordinary share (previous year: € 4.00) and € 3.02 per preference share (previous year: € 4.26 €). This is adjusted to the lower net income of KSB AG for the year. A sum of € 7.5 million is to be transferred to the revenue reserves.
The KSB share price showed a very good performance over the past twelve months. The value of ordinary shares increased by about 80 percent from the last AGM to the end of May, while the value of preference shares increased by approximately 30 percent.
Source: KSB SE & Co. KGaA
