While its net profit fell to €3.4 million in 2017, industrial equipment manufacturer Paul Wurth presented a net profit of €14.1 million for 2018 at its general meeting on Tuesday.

Sales amounted to €424.8 million, an 8.5% increase compared to the previous year. The year 2018 was also marked by a “record volume of new orders”, the Luxembourg group explained on Tuesday. At €553 million, new orders represented a 78% increase compared to the previous year.

From a geographical point of view, the Russian territory (42%) represented the largest market in 2018, followed by Western Europe (36%), the group's traditional domestic market.

Greening steel

Responsible for about 7% of global CO2 emissions, the steel industry is one of the largest industrial emitters of greenhouse gases. It is in this context that Paul Wurth took a minority stake in the German cleantech Sunfire in December 2018.

Adapting their industrial activities for a sustainable future is one of the major challenges facing companies in the steel sector. For this reason, Paul Wurth, “in close collaboration with the SMS group, is trying to fully exploit the potential of digital innovations and is developing digital solutions based on the group's know-how in terms of installations and processes,” the group said.