From the Sector

As the Rieter Holding Ltd. Announced, during the course of the acquisition of three Saurer businesses’, it came to serious violations of the statutory duty of loyalty, the obligation to maintain business secrets and the Rieter Code of Conduct by two members of the Board of Directors. They are said to have misused information internal to the Board of Directors in order to compete with Rieter through an offer of their own.

The Board of Directors considers this to be a strong violation of Rieter’s interests, to the detriment of all of its stakeholders, and a sustained breach of the relationship of trust within the Board of Directors which makes further cooperation impossible.

Therefore, the Board of Directors of Rieter Holding Ltd. intends to convene an Extraordinary General Meeting to dismiss these members. Furthermore, to protect Rieter’s interests, the Board of Directors will file a criminal complaint against them.

• Order intake of CHF 975.3 million (first half of 2020: CHF 250.7 million).
• Sales of CHF 400.5 million (first half of 2020: CHF 254.9 million).
• EBIT of CHF 9.0 million and net profit of CHF 5.3 million

The first half of 2021 has been characterized by a strong market recovery in combination with a regional shift in demand for new machinery and systems. Rieter anticipates a normalization of the demand for new systems in the coming months. The company assumes that spinning mills will continue to work at high-capacity levels.

For the full year, Rieter expects sales to be above CHF 900 million.

The realization of sales from the order backlog continues to be associated with risks in light of bottlenecks in material deliveries and freight capacities as well as the ongoing pandemic in key markets for Rieter.

In recent years, Rieter has implemented its strategy based on the cornerstones of innovation leadership, strengthening the components, spare parts and services businesses, and adjusting cost structures.

Crisis management in the pandemic year of 2020 was aimed at protecting employees, fulfilling customer commitments, ensuring liquidity, and also strengthening the market position for the time after the pandemic as well as retaining the ability to benefit from the incipient market recovery.

The focus for 2021 remains on the implementation of this strategy. The measures for crisis management relating to the protection of employees and fulfilling customer commitments are still in effect in countries that continue to be affected by the pandemic.

The Rieter Board of Directors has approved the implementation of the CAMPUS project. The Rieter CAMPUS comprises a customer and technology center as well as an administration building at the Winterthur location. It will make an important contribution to the implementation of the innovation strategy and to the enhancement of Rieter’s technology leadership position.