Company meets targets for last year and gives first forecast for 2020
Ahrensburg, March 30, 2020 – BASLER AG, the leading global manufacturer of industrial vision components, is releasing the audited annual report for fiscal year 2019 today.
In a stagnating market environment in 2019 the group’s sales stabilized on the high level of the previous year and amounted to Euro 162.0 million (previous year: Euro 150.0 million). Incoming orders amounted to Euro 166.5 million, and were also higher than the previous year’s level of Euro 154.0 million.
The earnings before taxes decreased particularly due to planned strategic investments in the building up of personnel to Euro 16.9 million (previous year: Euro 24.5 million, -31 %). Thus, the pre-tax margin summed up to 10.4 % (previous year: 16.3 %). With these results, Basler achieves the forecast communicated to the capital markets.
The free cash flow calculated as sum of the cash flows from operations and cash flow for investments reached a value of Euro -9.7 million (previous year: Euro 1.3 million). It was significantly impacted by the acquisition of MVLZ Sanbao Xingye in 2019.
Current Situation and Forecast
After a phase of a market decline of around 10% in 2019, the Basler Group assumed until March a structural stabilization for the 2020 financial year with low single-digit growth in the market. However, the outbreak of the coronavirus at the turn of the year and the pandemic spread are currently leading to a major change in the economic outlook and a high risk of a global recession. Even if the sales and procurement market situation of the Basler Group has so far been relatively stable, the management is assuming noticeable effects over the coming quarters. The impact cannot currently be quantified due to the uncertainty of the events.
Because of these uncertainties, the management board of Basler AG has decided to initially provide a forecast for the first half of the year. The outlook for the entire financial year follows when the semi-annual report is published. For the first half of 2020, the group expects a sales corridor of 70-78 million Euro with a pre-tax return between 6% and 10%. This forecast assumes that the situation in China will continue to improve gradually over the course of the second quarter and that demand in the regions of Europe and North America will weaken significantly in the second quarter.
The full annual report can be found on the company’s website (www.baslerweb.com).
Basler is a leading manufacturer of high-quality cameras and accessories for applications for industry, medicine, traffic and a variety of other markets. The company’s product portfolio encompasses line scan and area scan cameras in compact housing dimensions, camera modules in board level variants for embedded vision solutions, and 3D cameras. The catalog is rounded off by the user-friendly pylon SDK plus a broad spectrum of accessories, including several developed specially for Basler and optimally harmonized for their cameras. Basler has three decades of experience in computer vision. The Basler Group is home to approximately 800 employees at its headquarters in Ahrensburg, Germany, and other locations in Europe, Asia and North America.
For more information contact us by phone at +49 4102 463 500, by email at [email protected] or via our website at www.baslerweb.com.
