“As we predicted, the first half of 2024 has not yet brought a recovery in our industry“. Daniel Schmitt, ceo of the Homag Group, commented thus on the first half 2024 figures released by the German group: orders increased only slightly by 4 per cent to 699 million euros (first half 2023: 671 million). The order backlog fell to 833 million as of 30 June 2024. “The weak demand from the furniture and timber construction industry – continued Schmitt – has continued and is mainly reflected in the low level of activity of individual machines”.
Not only orders, “actual” sales also declined (minus 14 per cent), to just over EUR 706 million in the first half of 2024, compared to 817 million in the previous year.
In contrast, sales in the service sector developed positively. In this area, various initiatives led to an increase of about four per cent. Ebit before special effects dropped to EUR 21.5 million from EUR 56.8 million in the previous year.
“Due to this pronounced and prolonged market weakness, in November 2023 we initiated a package of measures to adjust capacity and increase efficiency“, the ceo explained. “We will have to implement these measures to secure the future of the Homag Group and maintain our competitiveness in the long term. A key element of the programme was precisely the reduction of about 600 jobs worldwide, of which about 350 in Germany. Here, we were able to achieve this through a natural fluctuation and hiring freeze as well as a voluntary exit programme. We have thus avoided redundancies for operational reasons“.
In the current year, the capacity reduction is expected to reduce fixed costs by 25 million euros, while from 2025, the group plans to reach 50 million.
