Linde orders exceeded 100,000 units

After achieving new highs in 2015, the KION Group expects further profitable growth in 2016, despite a forecast slowdown in global market growth.

Releasing its annual results, KION reports a 9.3% increase in the value of orders in 2015, which reached EUR5.216 billion (USD5.87 billion).

Revenue in 2015 exceeded the EUR5 billion threshold for the first time, advancing by 9% to EUR5.098 billion (USD5.73 billion), while earnings before interest and tax (EBIT) also went up by 9.0% toEUR482.9 million (USD543 million).

Mainly due to the strength of the core market in western Europe, the KION Group's new truck orders rose by 7% in 2015, comfortably beating the global market's growth rate of 1%. The number of trucks ordered in the market worldwide was 1.10 million, compared with 1.09 million in 2014. Overall, the KION Group received approximately 165,800 orders in 2015, more than in any other previous year. Within this total, the Linde brand achieved over 100,000 truck orders for the first time in its history.

Looking to 2016, KION anticipates an order intake of between EUR5.350 billion and EUR5.500 billion (USD6.02 billion-USD6.24 billion).

The group expects a slower rate of global market growth this year. Moreover, the trends seen last year are set to continue: sustained rise in orders in Europe and North America along with further contraction in Russia and Brazil. The KION Group believes that China will stabilise over the course of the year, although conditions will remain challenging.

"The very good results for 2015 are an excellent basis on which to continue forging ahead with the implementation of our Strategy 2020 and, above all, to make further progress in the highly promising fields of digitisation, automation and warehouse systems," says KION CEO Gordon Riske. "At the same time, we remain firmly focused on our planned efficiency gains - especially in production and development - because our market is becoming increasingly competitive."