ITALY - The Biesse Group, a global leader in the production of woodworking machinery, reported sales of € 164.8 million, EBITDA of € 17.4 million and a net profit of € 6.3 million in 3Q-2018. Compared to the 3Q-2017, sales were down by 1.4%, EBITDA fell 29.7% and net profit dropped by 41.9%.

These declines were mainly due to the increasing share of system solutions that require longer development and production times.

Cumulative sales in the first nine months were 4.5% above the previous year's level reaching € 520.8 million (9M-2017: € 498.3 million) as the 9M EBITDA fell by 7.1% to € 60.9 million. Biesse now expects sales in the range of € 730-740 million for the full year 2018 and EBITDA is expected to be in the range of € 92-95 million.

Mr. Stefano Porcellini, Group General Manager stated that “the results to 30 September are confirmation that Biesse will maintain its virtuous growth trend this year too albeit with a growth rate of about 7%, about 3 percentage points lower than the most recent Plan. The current order intake is further evidence of how global demand is increasingly oriented towards solutions with a high degree of automation, such as cells and integrated production lines. This trend, on the one hand has lifted our backlog to record levels - because of the longer production lead times - but also underlies the more conservative estimates of current revenue and, consequently, on profitability expectations for the current year. Although likely to be very positive, it is likely that cash generation will also feel the impact of this trend, as well as the impact of planned investment to upgrade productive capacity to satisfy new trends in demand.”