Geodis increases profits, renews IBM contract
Geodis has become the latest company to release its results for the full year 2003. The company reported a fall in net sales revenues to €3,215m from €3,250, a drop of 1.1%. However it had better news as far as its operating profit was concerned. It managed to increase it by just under 20% from €51.4m to €61.6m.
The company’s management described the markets in which it was operating as ‘stagnating’ and painted a bleak picture of the French market in particular. It stated that many groupage companies had faced financial problems, that there was an over supply of warehousing, that there was increased price pressure from clients and that costs had been forced up by increased social security costs. Revenue in France increased marginally to €2,261.6m although it did manage to increase its operating profits by 18.7% to €72.1m.
Elsewhere in Europe, the company managed to increase revenues in most of the countries in which it is present and most strongly in Spain (by 9.9%). However its operations ran at a loss of €8.7m, although this was an improvement on the previous year. The UK and Ireland failed to make a profit, whilst the loss generated by its Italian operations became worse.
In other news, the company announced that it had been able to renew one of its flagship contracts. On 1 March IBM and Geodis signed a five-year contract for the distribution of all finished goods, customs formalities and reverse logistics throughout EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa). The original contract was put in place in 1998 and over the years has been considerably expanded in both terms of geographic scope and functionality.
