2022 was marked by high energy prices and material shortages, but a cautious optimism prevails within the BIRN Group. The foundry group’s management is now looking forward to building upon the new group strategy launched earlier this year focusing on sustainability, increased commercial awareness, and employee well-being.
The group's revenue grew from 1.2 billion to over 1.5 billion DKK last year, while the profit before tax grew to 35 million compared to 8 million DKK the previous year. The equity during the same period rose to 458 million DKK, with an equity ratio of 53.4 percent.
The group, consisting of the companies BIRN, TASSO and ULDALL in Denmark, as well as BIRN Germany, KOCKUMS MASKIN in Sweden, and TASSO BERNAREGGI in Italy, had a challenging year due to rising energy prices and scarcity of raw materials. Considering these circumstances, the results is satisfactory, deems BIRN Groups’ CEO, Claus Beier:
- Considering the rising prices of electricity and gas, combined with reduced availability and fluctuations in iron scrap prices, the development in the annual report is overall positive. As a response to the numerous price increases, we have had to continuously adjust our prices, which has naturally contributed to the revenue growth. The positive results have mainly been achieved through the group's subsidiaries, while we find the result at our headquarter in Holstebro unsatisfactory.
The foundry group launched a new strategy earlier this year, with sustainability, increased commercial awareness, and employee well-being as its key elements.
Sustainability as economic leverage
The high financial expectations will, according to Claus Beier, be realized through increased focus on sustainability. BIRN Group is a trusted supplier to some of the largest corporations in Europe, particularly in the truck and the iron and machinery industries, and several of the group's customers will have to comply with the new EU requirements for sustainability reporting as early as next year. BIRN Group has therefore initiated a major review of the group's productions to collect data and assist customers with the coming documentation requirements.
The demand for documentation is continuously becoming more stringent, and in the future, sustainability documentation will become a new parameter on which we will be measured. Sustainability is thus also an area where we can differentiate ourselves, and we have therefore, ahead of the rest of our industry, started to set up data collection in our productions, enabling us to prepare life cycle analyses of our products, says Claus Beier and adds that BIRN Group is far along in this process and will soon be able to produce the first life cycle analyses.
The data collection will also help the group's companies to localize the areas in the production that have the greatest potential for CO2 reduction:
- Casting production is an energy-intensive process, and we are aware of this. Therefore, we are constantly working to optimize our energy consumption and recycle our materials so that we can reduce our climate footprint, Claus Beier concludes.
