Wacker Chemie defies high raw material prices - and sets new sales and earnings records
Created: 01/26/2022, 10:44 am
The Munich-based specialty chemicals group Wacker Chemie is on record course.
© Andreas Gebert/dpa/archive picture
The booming demand from the chip and solar industry gave Munich-based Wacker Chemie an outstanding year.
Sales and earnings reached record levels.
Munich – The Munich-based specialty chemicals group Wacker Chemie is on record course despite increased raw material and energy prices*.
The company announced on Wednesday that sales had jumped by almost a third to 6.2 billion euros last year, mainly thanks to the booming business with polysilicon for the solar and chip industry.
Wacker Chemie continues to see high demand
The operating result improved to 1.5 billion euros (2020: 0.67 billion euros) - that is also a record value.
The net profit has almost quadrupled to 780 million euros.
In 2020 it was still 202 million euros.
High prices for raw materials and electricity for the energy-intensive production burdened the operating result with half a billion euros more than expected in the autumn.
"In most of our customer industries, demand remained high throughout the year," said CEO Christian Hartel.
"At the same time, we achieved significantly better prices for our products than in 2020.
This also helped us to compensate for the sometimes sharp rise in raw material prices.” Demand continued unabated in the new year.
Booming polysilicon business
The preliminary business figures for 2021 were still above the expectations raised in autumn: In September, Wacker had announced sales of six billion and an operating result of 1.2 to 1.4 billion euros.
That drove the stock, which is listed in the MDax small-cap index, up three percent before the market.
Things went particularly well in 2021 in the polysilicon business, which is needed for photovoltaic systems as well as for the production of semiconductors.
Digitization in the corona pandemic has caused demand for chips to skyrocket.
In the Polysilicon division, sales* almost doubled to 1.53 billion euros.
With 655 million euros, it contributed almost half of the Group's operating result.
(rtr)
*Merkur.de is an offer from IPPEN.MEDIA.
