Knapp aims to double turnover by 2020

The new team on the Managing Board has set ambitious targets and aims to double its turnover by 2020.

"The new year started positively from the very beginning," says CEO, Gerald Hofer. "In the future we want to have a strong focus on food retail. We offer special solutions for this sector: for example, a fully automatic KNAPP sorting solution is in operation at Trinkgut, a subsidiary of Edeka, that ensures that 100,000 beverage cases are automatically registered, sorted and made ready for dispatch to beverage producers every day."

In the last year, the company's workforce also rose by 200 to reach 2,300 staff, of whom 1,700 are employed in Austria. Research and development continues to rank high at KNAPP, with the business again investing some 6 percent of its turnover in R&D.

Its success can be seen in full order books – turnover in the fiscal year 2012/13 increased by 16% toaround 380 million Euros. The company achieved an EBIT of 14.7 million Euros for the year in review.

"We are looking back at a very successful business year with many new references and exciting innovations. In addition, we are extremely pleased about the highest operating results in company history and have set the course for success in the future with our strategy programme for 2020," concludes KNAPP's CEO, Gerald Hofer.

In the KNAPP group, more than 400 people worked on innovation and solution development during the past fiscal year.

KNAPP's COO, Franz Mathi, says, "Intralogistics and our solutions are influenced significantly by the purchasing behaviour of consumers. From the traditional branch store to Internet commerce, the number of sales channels is continuously growing and the availability of sales items has become more and more important. The market calls for flexible systems suited to serve various trade channels. We believe that, with our solutions surrounding the core OSR Shuttle technology, we can flexibly adapt to growing and changing market demands. For the British department chain stores John Lewis and Boots, for example, we implemented trend-setting automation solutions."

98% export quota and increase in turnover by 80% in the fashion sector
Accounting for more than 70% of turnover, Western Europe is the largest sales region for KNAPP, followed by North America, a region in which turnover more than doubled. Latin America remained very stable, while the turnover tripled in the Asia-Pacific economic region. China, South Korea and Australia especially contributed to this growth. The fashion business area made a disproportionally high contribution to the growth, showing an increase in turnover by 80 percent compared to the previous year. Large-scale projects in the fashion sector include automation of the distribution centres for Hugo Boss and Olymp, with an order volume that runs into tens of millions.