GERMANY – The Häfele Group, the furniture fittings and interior lighting specialist, saw a record sales growth of 7.6 percent to 1.5 billion euros last year. The company’s management sees this result as a great success in view of the tense global economic framework.

The parent company in Germany and its five production companies grew by 3.3 percent. The sales companies increased by 8.8 percent in 2019. There was particularly strong growth in Asia and Eastern Europe and with the founding of Häfele Adriatic, Häfele intends to further internationalize. The Häfele Group now has 38 subsidiaries of its own worldwide. The group of companies generates 80 percent of its sales outside of Germany.

The number of employees worldwide rose by 300 to 8,100 last year. 1,650 of them are employed in Germany (50 more than in 2018). According to the company, the increase is primarily due to the takeover of the Stuttgart-based LED lighting specialist Nimbus in February 2019. With Nimbus, Häfele has expanded its expertise beyond the previous LED light in furniture product segment to light in rooms. In addition, the area of hardware technology for doors and interior fittings was advanced and smart control concepts were developed.

In Lehrte near Hanover, the company opened a second shipping center in 2019 to supply customers in northern Germany and neighboring countries. Together with the large logistics hub at the headquarters in Nagold, the logistics of Häfele Germany now stand on two pillars.

The group is cautious about the new financial year. After a positive start in the first quarter of 2020, due to developments in Western and Eastern Europe as well as North America and Southeast Asia, the company assumes that the 2019 sales level cannot be reached in 2020.

“The corona pandemic is currently putting us in crisis mode worldwide. Accordingly, we put our investment plan to the test and postponed everything with minor relevance until the situation normalized again,” explains company manager Sibylle Thierer.

Against the background of the current crisis, the Häfele Group has taken additional measures to secure the supply chain - even beyond the crisis - and to better interlink the companies in the group. For this purpose, global requirements are compared with worldwide stocks in order to control the supply of goods by the suppliers in a targeted manner, to ensure the supply of the companies with the required stocks, and to drive forward the optimization of global stocks.