Strong order book driving profitable revenue growth

Indus­tri­al ser­vices provider Bil­fin­ger con­tin­ued to grow in the finan­cial year 2018. Rel­e­vant key fig­ures improved across all busi­ness seg­ments, meet­ing the fore­casts and in some instances even out­per­form­ing them. The Strat­e­gy 2020 sta­bi­liza­tion phase has been com­plet­ed, the set mile­stones have been reached: Orders received, rev­enue and earn­ings devel­oped pos­i­tive­ly, while the Group’s liq­uid­i­ty and return on cap­i­tal employed were at lev­els above those of the pre­vi­ous year.

“We deliv­ered on our 2020 strat­e­gy and on our com­mit­ments to both inter­nal and exter­nal stake­hold­ers. I am par­tic­u­lar­ly pleased with the suc­cess­ful con­clu­sion of the DPA and our Monitor’s Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion that Bil­fin­ger is on an irre­versible course towards com­pli­ance self-suf­fi­cien­cy. I think we can con­fi­dent­ly say that 2018 was a year of achieve­ment for Bilfinger.”

Tom Blades, CEO Bilfinger

The busi­ness envi­ron­ment con­tin­ued to be robust in our six focus indus­tries, par­tic­u­lar­ly in Chem­i­cals & Petrochem, Oil & Gas and Phar­ma & Bio­phar­ma. Demand for engi­neer­ing and main­te­nance ser­vices con­tin­ued to build on top of grow­ing mechan­i­cal con­struc­tion oppor­tu­ni­ties in the Unit­ed States.

Strengthening the sense of purpose

Bil­fin­ger con­tin­ues to fine tune and adopt its 2–4‑6 Strat­e­gy to bet­ter serve cus­tomers and dri­ve mar­gin devel­op­ment. Its engi­neer­ing resources deliv­er­ing both project man­age­ment con­sult­ing and main­te­nance engi­neer­ing have now been ful­ly inte­grat­ed into the regions to enhance Bil­fin­gers end-to-end EMC capa­bil­i­ties. Con­se­quent­ly, the divi­sions are renamed E&M effec­tive Jan­u­ary 1, 2019. The tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies deliv­er­ing Ener­gy & Emis­sions, Bio­phar­ma and Automa­tion prod­ucts remain grouped togeth­er and serve Bil­fin­ger cus­tomers glob­al­ly from their Euro­pean man­u­fac­tur­ing base. Togeth­er they form the Tech­nolo­gies divi­sion also effec­tive Jan­u­ary 1, 2019.

Outlook 2019

In con­nec­tion with the described adjust­ment to its orga­ni­za­tion­al struc­ture, Bil­fin­ger is also adjust­ing its report­ing seg­ments as of the begin­ning of 2019. The fore­casts and state­ments relat­ed to the expect­ed devel­op­ment of the Group are made with­in the scope of these report­ing structures.

In the Tech­nolo­gies seg­ment, a sig­nif­i­cant increase in rev­enue (2018: €499 mil­lion) is expect­ed as a result of growth in order back­log. This is sub­ject to con­tin­ued and antic­i­pat­ed strong orders received in the course of the year. Bil­fin­ger expects sta­ble rev­enue devel­op­ment in the Engi­neer­ing & Main­te­nance Europe seg­ment (2018: €2,732 mil­lion). At Engi­neer­ing & Main­te­nance Inter­na­tion­al, the Group sees pos­i­tive momen­tum in the mar­kets and there­fore expects sig­nif­i­cant rev­enue growth (2018: €763 million).