Bilbao, 8.5.2019 – CIE Automotive has held its General Shareholders' Meeting in Bilbao today, during which the company announced the upcoming launch of a new Strategic Plan 2020-2025, due to it reaching in 2019 - one year ahead of schedule - the current targets of the 2016-2020 Strategic Plan.
In this sense, the company has announced that in 2019 the EBITDA margin - gross operating profit - will exceed 18% and the EBIT margin - net operating profit - will reach 14%. During his statement to shareholders, Jesús María Herrera, CEO of CIE Automotive, highlighted the strict commercial policy, the constant search for operational excellence, the austerity of fixed costs and the investment discipline of the Group as some of the key factors that have allowed the expansion of operating margins of almost 400 points in 4 years.
All this accompanied by a net profit of between 270 and 295 million euros and a solid and very healthy balance sheet that, without considering inorganic operations of 2019, will show a Net Financial Debt / EBITDA ratio of approximately 1.4 times.
For Antón Pradera, Chairman of CIE Automotive, "the Group has exceeded market expectations thanks to its diversification policy and to its business model, in which the know-how of a formidable management team and their commitment to fulfill the targets always stand out".
Also during the Shareholders' Meeting, CIE has released the results of the first quarter of 2019, with an EBITDA of 151.0 million euros and a record quarterly net profit of 72.6 million euros, 10% and 15% more than in the same period of the previous year.
The Group's turnover was 812.2 million euros, which represents a growth of 6% in an Automotive market that has fallen by -7% in the first quarter of the year.
Jesús María Herrera, CEO, has insisted that "these excellent results have to be valued, as we have achieved them in the most complicated context of the sector for the last 10 years". Furthermore, he has also explained that "in this financial year 2019 we will close a very successful phase of the project and open another one with new and ambitious challenges that will be specified in the Strategic Plan 2020-2025, one of whose pillars will be the inorganic growth and the value generation through the application of CIE’s management model, as it will be the case of the acquisition of Inteva's roof systems business ".
