- Preliminary three-month results published for first time
- At €92.5 million, value-added sales edge upwards in year-onyear
comparison - EBT increases from €7.3 million to €9.4 million
- Twelve-month EBT forecast at previous year’s level is reaffirmed
The earnings improvement is attributable to a decline in costs and expenses in absolute terms, covering all significant items, in particular staff costs. The “print” unit – previously known as high-performance printing – recorded an improvement in value-added sales from €71.3 million to €73.8 million. EBT rose to €10.6 million, compared with a total of € 8.1 million posted for the same period a year ago. Despite a considerable downturn in the course of the last financial year, value-added sales in direct marketing regained their footing at €18.8 million in the first quarter of FY 2004/5, thus emulating the performance of Q1 2003/4 (€18.9 million). EBT amounted to €0.3 million (Q1 2003/4: €1.1 million), which is above target and comparable with EBT posted in the fourth quarter of 2003/4 (July – September). The results for the Group as a whole are derived from the abovementioned business units as well as the corporate services unit, which covers the full range of internal service functions, and consolidation effects. Benefiting from a solid business performance in the first quarter, schlott gruppe has already secured a considerable part of its annual target. As outlined in a previous news release, the first quarter benefited from the usually high utilisation rates and profit strength of this period during the year.
The full extent of the effects of the revised marketing concepts announced by leading mail-order companies and the thus resulting changes to the deployment of advertising media has yet to be gauged in detail. Therefore, schlott gruppe remains conservative in its assessment, reaffirming its original forecast of FY 2004/5 EBT comparable to that achieved in the previous financial year (FY 2003/4: €25.6 million).
Notes to financial data:
Alongside “revenue/sales”, schlott gruppe uses so-called “value-added sales” as a financial indicator – both in its external communications and as part of its internal controlling mechanisms. Revenue is subject to fluctuations that are beyond the company’s sphere of influence. These fluctuations are attributable to the volume of paper supplied by customers as raw material for certain projects: in contrast to paper purchased directly by the company, paper supplied by customers is not included in the accounts of schlott gruppe. In the 2003/4 financial year, the so-called paper provision ratio was 72.3 per cent. As a financial indicator, “value-added sales” eliminates fluctuations relating to paper supplied by customers, thus reflecting the actual business performance.
