Etteplan Financial Statement Release 2019 published: A year of international growth

Etteplan News Release February 11, 2020 

Etteplan’s Financial Statement Release 2019 has been published. You can find the Report and the related presentation materials at https://www.etteplan.com/investors/reports-presentations.

Join our webcast today February 11, 2020 at 2.30 P.M. EET. More information at  http://bit.ly/2HaPcej . A recording of the webcast can be found through the same link after the live event.

President and CEO Juha Näkki

“Etteplan had another good year in 2019. Revenue growth continued for the 25th consecutive quarter, profitability was at the targeted level for the full year and cash flow was excellent. All our service areas performed general well, and I want to thank our personnel for their good work.

During the year, we accelerated our international growth through four acquisitions: we strengthened our position in Sweden by making two acquisitions, we strengthened our market leading position in technical documentation in the Netherlands and we started the Engineering Solutions business in Germany. The integration of all of the acquisitions has progressed according to our plans. We also continued our organic growth, although it did slow down toward the end of the year.

The demand situation development was twofold during the year. Demand grew in the first half of the year. In the second half of the year, demand growth slowed down, and it weakened toward the end of the year. In Finland, the strikes in December had a very negative effect on our business in all of our service areas. The strike in the engineering and consulting industry had a direct impact on our revenue and operating profit. In addition, the strikes in our customer industries had an indirect impact on our business as customers focused on minimizing strike effects instead of focusing on their normal business. In China, the trade war had a significant impact on local demand and, as a result, our business.

The implementation of our strategy progressed well during the year. The share of revenue represented by Managed Services exceeded 60 per cent for the first time during the year. The development of the project business was particularly strong. For example, we won the largest plant engineering project in Etteplan’s history. We also continued to make investments in the development of our service offering, which supported our business development. We carried out several interesting projects around new technologies and launched our first SaaS service.

We updated our strategy and financial targets in late December. The key objective of our strategy, “Increasing value for customers”, is to increase the value we create for our customers by further developing our service solutions and increasingly incorporating new technologies into our service offering. We will also continue our international growth and we are aiming for revenue of more than EUR 500 million in 2024.   

We entered the new year in a weaker market situation and the year has got off to a slow start. The Finnish labour market situation and the coronavirus outbreak are increasing uncertainty in the markets and making the development of our business more difficult to predict. However, at the same time, political uncertainty has eased slightly, so we believe the demand situation will pick up during the early part of the year and we expect the good development of our business to continue in 2020.”

Additional information:
Juha Näkki, President and CEO, tel. +358 10 307 2077
Outi Torniainen, SVP, Marketing and Communications, tel. +358 10 307 3302