LM Glasfiber's sales continued its strong growth trend as we increased our capacity through new factories in key markets as well as through significant manufacturing throughput improvements. In terms of MW, sales rose to an all time high of 4,950MW from 4,100MW in 2006. The growth in sales however did not translate into increased profits as LM Glasfiber experienced significant growing pains in connection with the ramp-up of its Spanish operations.
Roland Sundén, CEO of LM Glasfiber, said: "2007 was a year of great transformation in the face of difficult growth challenges for LM Glasfiber. Responding to fast growing demand we increased our sales by 22%, supplying more than 20 customers, including 8 of the top-10 wind turbine manufacturers.
Despite the tangible progress we achieved in 2007, we acknowledge that our results fell short of our expectations. This was mainly due to delays in the capacity expansion programme in our Spanish operations, resulting in excessive operating and logistics costs.
Fulfilling our commitments to our customers is always given top priority in LM Glasfiber. Unfortunately shipments to our customers were greatly delayed in the first half of 2007 due to significantly delayed start-ups.
To compensate, we manufactured blades for the Spanish market in several of our other factories in Europe, North America and Asia. These activities involved substantial costs, but were necessary for us to meet our obligations towards our customers.
The scheduled capacity increases in Spain have now been completed, and the factories reached their highest level of efficiency ever at the end of 2007.
In 2007, as a result we successfully deepened our strategic customer relations resulting in the largest ever backlog of orders at the end of 2007 totalling approximately DKK 18 billion for 2008 and the years ahead.
We brought three new factories online in 2007, expanded existing facilities and we significantly raised throughput in our existing plants.
Through our comprehensive corporate transformation programme REACH we have been building business excellence in all our processes - resulting in clear improvements across our business in quality, customer responsiveness, sourcing among others.
At the end of 2007 we had supplied more than 105,500 blades corresponding to blades for more than a third of all wind turbines world wide saving the world for 47 million tons of CO2 and we created more than 2,200 new jobs, bringing the total number of employees to 5,905.
The market outlook for the wind power industry for the next few years is very positive. In addition LM Glasfiber expects outsourcing of blade production to further increase in importance on an aggregate industry level. This represents a strategic business opportunity that LM Glasfiber is in a good position to exploit going forward.
In order to sustain growth and fortify our position as the leading global independent supplier of advanced rotor blades, we are redoubling our efforts to build up production capacity in key markets, maximise throughput in our factories, and maintain an edge in innovation and development.
We are currently building new factories in the USA and Poland, in addition to expanding our existing capacity in Denmark and China, and additional factories are currently being considered. Scheduled capacity additions in 2008 amount to a total of more than 2,000 MW - a doubling on 2007.
This is the strong foundation we build on for 2008, when our progress in 2007 will allow us to grow faster and more profitably, bringing us closer to our target share of more than a third of the global market in 2012."
The financial statements were adopted at LM Glasfiber Holding A/S's Annual General Meeting earlier today.
The Annual Report 2007 for LM Glasfiber Holding A/S is available for download at www.lmglasfiber.com/investor and supporting imagery can be downloaded from www.lmglasfiber.com/images.
For additional information please contact:
Steen Broust Nielsen,
Communication Director
Tel.
E-mail sbn@lmglasfiber.com
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