location Dortmund, Date 2019.05.22

Internationally active IT consulting company Materna Information & Communications SE closed the 2018 business year very successfully with a group turnover amounting to 288.6 million euros. In comparison to the previous year, this represents an increase of 13.5 percent, which has almost exclusively resulted from organic growth. Materna is benefiting from the good market conditions prevailing in the IT sector as well as the continuing trend towards digitization in Germany. The group also increased its workforce by more than 110 employees and at the end of 2018 was employing a total of 2,127 staff.

“We are very pleased with the performance of the group. Last year the drivers behind the turnover were projects developing specialist applications for public sector authorities and software projects for IT organisations”, explained Michael Knopp, Chief Financial Officer of the Materna Group.

In the last business year, Materna achieved earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) amounting to 36.4 million euros which saw them doubling the previous year’s figures of 17.8 million euros. The EBIT for 2018 includes a special one-off effect of 12.9 million euros from the sale of the company premises at the head office in Dortmund, Germany. Adjusted to account for this, the EBIT for 2018 was 23.5 million euros, which represents an increase of 32 percent. There had been no such significant special effects in the previous year. It was possible to improve the equity ratio from 22.2 percent to 31.7 percent and to increase net liquidity (liquid assets minus financial liabilities) from 15.2 million euros to 49.6 million euros. This, in addition to the very good business operations, was also due to the sale of the building.

The first quarter 2019 saw business continuing to develop well with a growth in turnover of 13.5 percent compared to the same period in the previous year. Materna is planning to achieve an overall growth in turnover of around ten percent for 2019 overall.

Project business in the domestic market

Domestic business made up 83 percent of the group turnover. Last year Materna was able to successfully implement a whole series of very different projects for both existing and new customers. This ranged from software development projects for federal authorities and digitization projects for large corporations and medium-sized enterprises to IT consulting and implementation projects for large IT organisations in many different sectors. Materna intends to continue growing these core topics too.

The public sector business line is continuing to extend its portfolio and is now also addressing the part of the healthcare sector which is regulated by law. This includes solutions for digitizing process landscapes and the IT-related modernization of workplaces.

Customer projects are based on the market-leading technologies from, among others, our key partners BMC, IBM, Micro Focus, Oracle, SAP and ServiceNow. This year Materna particularly wants to push forward their still relatively new partnership with AWS technologies (Amazon Web Services). Business-critical company applications for the cloud are being developed more and more often now.

One of Materna’s core areas of expertise is the implementation of IT service management solutions. According to the “ISG Provider Germany 2019 Lens SIAM/ITSM” study, Materna is one of the leading German companies in all four of the aspects investigated for the study.

International project business

Last year, Materna completed the process of changing over to the European legal form of company, SE. This means the group of companies is particularly well-positioned for continuing its internationalisation.

Their business with airports and airlines is very international, too. Materna delivers solutions for automated passenger and baggage handling. A contract with Denver Airport saw Materna taking on their first large project in the USA last year. Other projects were implemented in Toronto and Montréal in Canada too. Promising chances are currently being developed with several airports in Asia.

The business with SAP projects is also active on the international stage. Materna addresses the SAP market through its subsidiary cbs Corporate Business Solutions from Heidelberg. The demand for global transformation projects according to the aim of “ONE Digital Enterprise on S/4HANA“, a globally uniform process and system landscape, has continued to grow. This enabled cbs to gain 73 new customers in industry last year, achieving them a turnover of 79.5 million euros.

About Materna

Materna as a group currently employs more than 2,200 people around the world and generated sales of 288,6 million euros in 2018. Materna covers the entire service spectrum of a full-service provider in the premium segment: from consultation and implementation through to operations. Materna advises and assists companies and the public sector in all aspects of digitization and provides tailor-made technologies for agile, flexible and secure IT. Its customers include IT organizations and user departments in companies and the public sector. Materna is organised in five business lines: IT Factory, Digital Enterprise, Public Sector, Mobility and cbs, their subsidiary for SAP from Heidelberg.