2020 in review
Last year we continued our profitable growth strategy focusing on our strategic initiatives; balance, customer experience, sustainability, continuous improvement culture and innovations. Even if we were not able to grow, we achieved a lot;
We managed to keep our net sales on a realistic though not targeted level with only a slight drop of 4% out of the previous year coming to 384 million EUR. Our profitability level increased significantly due to our efficiency projects and structural changes, and we managed to reach 35 million EUR in EBITDA. We released our plans to invest in a new site in Germany and transfer operations from the existing three factories into this new site. We also informed of our plans to strengthen our focus on sales and services in the Netherlands and Sweden and transfer our production from the Netherlands and Sweden to other Teknos sites.
We succeeded to streamline our product portfolio. We started conceptualizing our service offering and are in a testing phase to utilize virtual reality to provide remote technical service to our customers mitigating any possible travel restrictions. We transformed our trainings to virtual trainings to adapt to the new situation and still maintained good progress with e.g. leadership trainings. A good example of our sustainable innovations was the development and launch of new Teknos BIORA® AIR product with an extraordinary Nordic Indoor Air Purifier technology that cleans the air from harmful aldehydes.
In 2021, we will put efforts into the sustainability and into the innovations and finding new ways of utilising what we have learned. We continue focusing on our strategic targets with what we are unique in; being locally present, being flexible and bringing new solutions and options for our customers.
We also need to be very mindful of where we currently are; we are still in the middle of pandemic. Due to that, there is a lot of uncertainty at present in the chemical supply chain. This directly effects the coatings industry and has led to unexpected increases in raw material prices, delivery issues, shortages and in some cases Force Majeure notices being issued by our suppliers. Please be assured that we are doing our utmost to find suitable customer-oriented solutions and to minimize the impact of this unfortunate situation.
For 2021 the most important thing is going to be everybody’s personal health and well-being. I know that together with all our stakeholders we can continue building Teknos towards our vision; to be sustainable coating solutions provider close to the customer.