Cargotec had a strong year in 2016 with operating profit, excluding restructuring costs, the highest in the group’s history, an improving profit margin and a strong cash flow.
Mika Vehviläinen, CEO, Cargotec, said that it was a “good year” for the group with operating profit increasing by 8% up to €250.2 million, representing 7.1% of sales.
This is despite orders decreasing 8% to €3,283 million and sales declining by 6% to total €3,514 million.
During 2016, Kalmar secured 52% of the orders, Hiab 31% and MacGregor 17%. In geographic terms, the Americas’ share of all orders was 30%. Asia-Pacific’s share of orders decreased to 23%. EMEA’s share of orders received increased and was 47%. The share of service orders was 27% of all orders received.
Mr Vehviläinen pointed out that Hiab in particular had a very good year with the successful launch of a number of new products.
Profitability improved also for Kalmar which made significant investments in the software business, among other things, to enable future growth.
Taking into account the challenging marketing conditions affecting MacGregor, Mr Vehviläinen said that the year was satisfactory and new measures to ensure profitability were implemented quickly.
Other milestones achieved in 2016 include Cargotec’s move to promote digitalisation because of an increase in demand for the number of products being connected to analytic platforms.
To this end, it established the IoT1 Cloud platform as a solid foundation for its digital solutions and the first products to utilise the platform have now been launched.
Mr Vehviläinen said: “We [will] continue to develop services business, digitalisation and leadership excellence in 2017. These are key factors for the achievement of market leadership in intelligent cargo handling.”
He added that the Navis software business is one of the group’s key enablers of future growth going forward.
In 2016, it supplemented its offering through the acquisition of the INTERSCHALT software company, which provides products for stowage planning, equipment management and vessel monitoring.
“I believe that our investment in the development of operations will also improve our operating profit in 2017,” Mr Vehviläinen added.
