KBA shareholders have approved the group's new company structure, but will forego a dividend for 2014.
Appropriately with changes to legal and management structures, the 90th annual meeting in Würzburg, Germany, took place in a former press hall.
President and chief executive Claus Bolza-Schünemann emphasised advantages of a structure which will turn parent Koenig & Bauer AG into a holding company after spinning-off four operating subsidiaries. These cover digital and web, sheetfed, security press activities and production.
The holding company's management board is to be reduced from six to three members, with Bolza-Schünemann, chief financial officer Mathias Dähn and CRO Andreas Pleßke remaining. Displaced board members Michael Kummert, Christoph Müller and Ralf Sammeck become managing directors of the operating companies in their respective fields, with Lothar Hohmann leading the security press business in Würzburg.
Implementation of Fit@All programme is nearly complete, with 1500 jobs cut since it was announced in December 2013.
"This process has not only been painful for those employees affected, but given the significantly shrunken global market volume for new sheetfed and web offset presses it was unfortunately unavoidable," says Bolza-Schünemann. "Since 2006 group revenue has fallen by 37 per cent and payroll has been reduced by 31 per cent."
No dividend was proposed with group earnings before taxes (EBT) of 5.5 million Euros and 0.3 million Euros after taxes following a net loss from the previous year.
Group sales for 2015 are forecast at more than one billion Euros with an EBT margin of up to two per cent. In the mid term KBA is targeting an EBT margin of four to six per cent for the group following completion of the restructuring.
EBT targets for sheetfed and digital and web are below those for the special markets, in some of which KBA is the global market.
Bolza-Schünemann says KBA is making traction in new niche applications, such as digital decor printing. First orders have been booked its up to 2.25m-wide, high-volume inkjet web presses, and a digital press with a web width of up to 2.8m for corrugated packaging - developed with HP - is expected to be unveiled in the fourth quarter of 2015.
The meeting appointed Gisela Lanza (41) - a university professor at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and head of the Institute of Production Science (wbk) at KIT - and Carl Ferdinand Oetker (42), as supervisory board members, replacing longstanding members Baldwin Knauf (75) and Reinhart Siewert (77) who have resigned. Oetker is managing partner at FO Holding GmbH and managing director at WINK Verwaltungsgesellschaft.
Pictured: New directors Lanza and Oetker
On our homepage: Claus Bolza-Schünemann addresses the meeting
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