Internationalization Ensures ABO Wind's Corporate Success
Wiesbaden, Germany - The ABO Wind Group has published its financial figures for 2019. Overall, the company looks back on a successful year 2019. The importance of international markets continues to increase in times of national expansion misery.
ABO Wind looks back on a successful business year 2019. Last year, the group achieved sales revenues of 126.27 million euros (2018: 150.26 million euros). Total operating performance (sales revenues plus changes in inventories and own work capitalized) amounted to 149.3 million euros (previous year: 149.9 million euros). In total, ABO Wind achieved a net profit for the year of 11.402 million euros. Although this is almost 11 percent below the previous year's result (2018: EUR 12.745 million), it exceeds the EUR 10 million mark for the fourth time in succession.
In 2019, ABO Wind has installed wind or solar parks in Germany, France, Ireland, Greece and Hungary with a combined capacity of 88 megawatts (MW). In addition to the sale of turnkey plants, the sale of projects already in the development phase also contributed to the company's success. Such sales will reach a volume of 870 MW in Spain and Finland in 2019, with the majority of the revenues expected to flow in the coming months and years as development and construction progresses, the company stated.
ABO Wind has further strengthened its international business in 2019, with 58 percent contributing significantly more than half of group sales. This means that the share of German business has further decreased to around 42 percent. According to ABO Wind, project rights sales in Finland, France and Spain in particular formed the foundation of the international success.
"Germany remains our most important market. But growth in recent years has been on an international level," says CEO Andreas Höllinger. Thus, it was possible to reduce the previously high dependency on the German market. This strategy is paying off: Whereas in 2017, onshore wind farms with a capacity of around 5,000 megawatts were installed in Germany, this figure fell to 1,000 megawatts in 2019.
While this development, which was fatal for the energy turnaround in Germany, forced turbine manufacturers to lay off workers on a grand scale, ABO Wind was able to compensate for the decline in Germany and expand its employee base despite the despite the lack of approvals. The ABO Wind group currently employs 642 employees, one hundred more than in the previous year. 446 of them work at the nine German office locations - most of them at the Wiesbaden headquarters and on the opposite side of the Rhine in Heidesheim near Mainz.
Although the corona pandemic in recent months has has made it difficult to secure new sites for the development of wind and solar projects in many countries, ABO Wind has succeeded in further increasing the volume of wind and solar farms under development from mid-2019 to the present day. In total, ABO Wind is now working on projects with a rated output of around 12,000 MW (12 gigawatts). In terms of the planned megawatt output of the projects, around one third of the development portfolio is located in Argentina, Colombia, Tanzania and South Africa.
Source: IWR Online, 24 Jun 2020
