Langley Holdings, the engineering and industrial group that controls German press maker Manroland Sheetfed, released results for its most recent fiscal, ended 31 December, 2016. The company states it had a record year, with profits before tax up by 15 percent on the previous year, and that Manroland Sheetfed, acquired five years ago in February, had now returned the group’s initial investment in full.
The group, led by Chairman Tony Langley, reported a pre-tax profit of €122.7 million on revenue of €900.9 million. Langley earned roughly 45 percent of its profits in Euro currency, 20 percent in US currency, 20 percent in GPB UK currency, and 15 percent in other currencies, although only a quarter of UK earnings were derived from the UK-based businesses, the majority coming from the UK subsidiaries of the European divisions.
Manroland Sheetfed is the group’s largest division in revenue and employee terms and has around 40 subsidiaries around the world. Under Langley’s ownership the company has installed around 500 printing presses, maintained several thousands more and applied for 169 patents. In 2014, the press builder introduced the new Roland 700 Evolution machine.
Piller, the German producer of power security systems, was the largest contributor to the group’s result. IT hosting and Cloud data centres were Piller’s main driver in 2016, although healthcare, aircraft ground power and naval military systems also featured. Piller’s successes to date have been without any material levels of business from China, explains Langley Holdings, and in 2016 the company secured a cornerstone project for the Shanghai Stock Exchange. Piller equipment, according to the company, is installed at most of the world’s leading exchanges.
In November the group acquired the business and assets of Texas-based Active Power, a producer of kinetic energy storage devices, and merged the business into its Piller division.
ARO, Langley’s French producer of welding technology for the automotive sector, also had another successful year on the back of a still buoyant sector. Langley explains there was generally a dearth of investment in the cement, gypsum, steel and alumina sectors though and Claudius Peters, the group’s German plant machinery producer, although profitable, was much less so on a subdued level of business.
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