Continental accelerates its growth

The tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny Con­ti­nen­tal released its 2018 half-year results in Hanover. The Dax-list­ed com­pa­ny accel­er­at­ed its growth in the sec­ond quar­ter of 2018 and once again grew faster than its rel­e­vant mar­kets. After six months, organ­ic sales growth amount­ed to 5.4 per­cent, with all five divi­sions mak­ing a con­tri­bu­tion. In the same peri­od, the Auto­mo­tive busi­ness was up 6.6 per­cent in organ­ic terms. It was thus able to grow near­ly 5 per­cent­age points faster than the glob­al pro­duc­tion of pas­sen­ger cars and light com­mer­cial vehi­cles, which was up by about 2 per­cent. For the cur­rent year, the com­pa­ny still expects the glob­al pro­duc­tion of pas­sen­ger cars and light com­mer­cial vehi­cles to rise by more than 1 percent.
In the first half of the year, Con­ti­nen­tal upped its sales to €22.4 bil­lion and post­ed an adjust­ed oper­at­ing result of €2.2 bil­lion. This cor­re­sponds to an adjust­ed EBIT mar­gin of 10 percent.
Con­ti­nen­tal CEO Dr. Elmar Degenhart:

“Our tech­no­log­i­cal strength under­pins our rapid and prof­itable growth. It makes mobil­i­ty around the world safe, clean and intel­li­gent. It is pio­neer­ing for the mobil­i­ty of the future and vital for our long-term suc­cess in an envi­ron­ment char­ac­ter­ized by change and uncertainty.”

Solid growth in all divisions

“As expect­ed, all five divi­sions post­ed good organ­ic growth. In light of this, we are sat­is­fied with our sales devel­op­ment in the first half of the year,” said CFO Wolf­gang Schae­fer, com­ment­ing on the past half-year. With regards to the results, he added: “The indus­try is cur­rent­ly under­go­ing rad­i­cal tech­no­log­i­cal change. It is all about automa­tion, con­nec­tiv­i­ty and elec­tri­fi­ca­tion. Look­ing at our results, the trend reflects the sub­stan­tial invest­ments we have made in the devel­op­ment of these future tech­nolo­gies. The increase in order intake has in recent years also result­ed in start-up costs.” In the last half-year, the tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny spent €2.9 bil­lion on invest­ments as well as on research and devel­op­ment. Accord­ing to Schae­fer, there are only a few com­pa­nies world­wide that are push­ing devel­op­ments in the field of mobil­i­ty to this extent.