SARTORIUS AG 
Sales revenue and profits slumped significantly, but the Goettingen-based DAX-listed company wants to return to growth this year. "Customers are starting to order normally again," said CEO Joachim Kreuzburg on Friday at the presentation of the annual results. In the past year, they had partly lived off their stocks. However, business has picked up again since the end of the third quarter. "And we expect this trend to gradually strengthen over the course of 2024."
For this year, the company anticipates a currency-adjusted increase in sales in the mid to upper single-digit percentage range. The operating return on sales is expected to improve to just over 30%. In 2023, it had shrunk to 28.3% (previous year: 33.8%). Net profit fell by a good 48% to 338.5 million euros. Turnover fell by almost 19 percent to just under 3.4 billion euros. Adjusted for currency effects, the decline amounted to 16.6 percent - Sartorius had recently forecast about 17 percent less after repeatedly lowering its annual targets.
Kreuzburg spoke of an unusually challenging year for Sartorius and the entire industry. Competitors such as Darmstadt-based Merck had also had to cut back on targets. "The reduction in customer inventories and other factors such as very weak demand in China had a longer and more pronounced impact on business development than originally forecast," said Kreuzburg. During the coronavirus pandemic, Sartorius benefited from high demand for its products used in the manufacture of Covid vaccines and medicines, achieving growth rates of over 30 percent. This exceptional boom came to an abrupt end last year.
Sartorius also set itself new medium-term business targets after the previous ones were put to the test last fall. Sartorius expects average sales revenue growth of more than ten percent per year until 2028, with the margin rising to around 34 percent. However, Kreuzburg admitted that Sartorius would not achieve its original target of sales revenue of around 5.5 billion euros in 2025, which had been raised several times. "We had set our sights a little too high." With the new target, the company will be a year and a half behind schedule. This is largely due to the fact that the normalization of business has taken longer, but also to the fact that China is developing more slowly than originally thought, with lower growth rates.
Sartorius shares nevertheless rose by more than nine percent and topped the list of winners in the DAX. Merck shares also received a tailwind as a result, gaining more than five percent.
(Report by Patricia Weiß, edited by Ralf Banser. If you have any questions, please contact our editorial team at berlin.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for politics and the economy) or frankfurt.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for companies and markets).)
