Company
Beckhoff Automation records successful financial year 2023
Beckhoff Automation successfully continued its growth trajectory in the 2023 financial year. The automation technology specialist increased its turnover to 1.75 billion euros. This corresponds to an increase of 16 percent compared to the previous year's turnover of 1.515 billion euros. Currently, 5,500 employees worldwide (March 2024), including more than 2,000 engineers, contribute to the company's global success. Continuous innovation in all areas of automation and close cooperation with many global technology leaders are the success factors of automation specialist Beckhoff from Verl.
"2023 was a challenging financial year," explains Managing Director Hans Beckhoff and continues: "The strong development of incoming orders from 2022 continued in the first months of 2023 and led to a record order backlog and turnover. However, incoming orders weakened significantly as the year progressed. We mainly attribute this to the fact that our customers built up their inventories and orders to an above-average extent in 2022 and at the beginning of 2023 in order to compensate for fluctuations in deliveries during the components crisis. They corrected this in the course of 2023 by placing lower order volumes. In addition, cyclical declines had an impact in some regions and sectors."
In the first quarter of 2024, Beckhoff is observing a stabilization of incoming orders with a slight upward trend. "We anticipate a significant increase in demand in the second half of the year," says Hans Beckhoff, adding: "In 2024, however, we will probably see a significant decline in incoming orders and sales compared to 2023. We don't expect to see decent growth again until 2025. However, this does not worry us. This is the fifth sharp downturn we have experienced in our 44-year company history. As a solid family business, we are well prepared for this and will seize the resulting opportunities together with our customers!"
All Beckhoff products available from stock again
Over the past two years, Beckhoff has made extensive investments in production, warehousing and infrastructure, including increasing production capacity by more than 100 percent. In addition, the supply situation for components on the market has improved significantly. Hans Beckhoff: "Our goal was to do everything we could to enable reliable standard delivery times for our customers again by the end of 2023." Beckhoff can currently supply almost all products from stock again.
Innovations for automation
Beckhoff Automation is once again announcing exciting innovations for the upcoming Hannover Messe, such as Industrial PCs with more CPU power, powerful control software under Windows and Linux, expansion of the Beckhoff Bus Terminal system, replacement of the control cabinet with the MX system, new drive amplifiers and motors, new software-based safety CPUs and the deep integration of AI into control and engineering functions.
Positive outlook for long-term development
Overall, Hans Beckhoff takes a positive view of the future: "Automation is a basic technology that is used in all areas of social life worldwide and is driving the digital and ecological transformation in particular. This constantly growing demand and the introduction of new product ranges and technologies should enable good and steady growth again from 2025. Our software and PC-based control technology in combination with our powerful hardware for I/O, motion, vision and AI as well as the expertise and commitment of our employees provide a very good basis for many successful customer applications. We are looking forward to these challenges."