After today's publication of the quarterly figures of Delivery Hero, the current business figures of all Dax companies are now completely available.

While the loss-making food delivery service slipped even deeper into the red, the 30 Dax companies achieved higher sales and profits than ever before in the second quarter.

This is the result of an analysis carried out by the auditing and consulting firm EY on the basis of the company's annual and quarterly reports.

Mark Fehr

Editor in business.

  • Follow I follow

According to this, the German flagship companies have coped well with the slump in the year 2020, which was heavily influenced by the pandemic, and are recovering strongly. As a result, sales in the second quarter rose by a total of 29 percent to 370 billion euros compared to the same period in the previous year. They are also 14 percent higher than pre-crisis sales. After deducting costs, operating profits (EBIT) of 44.6 billion euros remained. That is 87 percent more than before the pandemic. In the second quarter of 2020, the Dax companies had made a loss of one billion euros.

According to Henrik Ahlers, CEO of EY, the Dax companies have never before made such a high profit as they do now.

The second quarter of 2021 was very strong.

“In many areas, the demand clearly exceeds the supply, so that the price environment is extremely favorable for some companies, which explains at least part of the high profits,” says Ahlers.

However, according to Ahlers, risks remain, as lockdowns could break the supply chains again and cause sales to collapse.

In addition, the lack of supplier products will cause considerable problems for some time to come.

No downsizing on a large scale

The deficiency mentioned by Ahlers can be observed, for example in the automotive industry, where important semiconductor chips are missing. In the second quarter, according to an EY analysis, it was nevertheless the automakers who brought in the highest profits in the Dax. Volkswagen, Daimler and BMW achieved an operating profit of 16.7 billion euros after these three companies had presented deep red figures in the same period of the previous year with a total loss of 4.7 billion euros.

According to EY boss Ahlers, the high DAX profits are due, among other things, to the fact that many companies have significantly reduced their costs in recent months. Therefore, they are now often better off than they were before the pandemic. However, the restructuring of the German economy is not over. Group structures would be realigned, business models would be scrutinized and fixed costs would be reduced. Digitization and research and development also demanded a lot from companies.

According to the EY analysis, the cost reductions have not yet led to Dax companies having to cut jobs on a large scale. The total number of employees rose slightly in the second quarter by one percent to 3.56 million. The number of employees fell most at the chemical company BASF, followed by the industrial service provider Linde and the energy giant Eon. In contrast, the number of employees at the growth company Delivery Hero rose rapidly by more than 60 percent. The number of employees at Deutsche Börse also increased by 50 percent.

Spending on its rapid growth has left the food delivery service Delivery Hero another loss. At the same time, however, the company increased its sales in the second quarter far more than any other Dax group. Sales at Delivery Hero grew by 166 percent - twice as fast as at Covestro. The materials specialist achieved the second largest increase in sales in the Dax after Delivery Hero, followed by Volkswagen, BASF and Adidas.