The new Bosch leadership around Stefan Hartung, who has been in office since January, probably announced record sales at the beginning of their term of office.
This amounted to 78.8 billion euros last year, as the company announced on the basis of the preliminary business figures.
If the value is confirmed in the final balance sheet, which will be presented in a few months, the previous Bosch boss Volkmar Denner would have handed his successor a record.
The values before the pandemic were therefore exceeded by a few hundred million euros, and the sales forecast from the beginning of 2021 by more than 2 billion euros.
Gustave parts
Business correspondent in Stuttgart.
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The Stuttgart technology group, which is considered the largest automotive supplier in the world, has restructured the management team significantly in recent months.
With Hartung, the head of finance Markus Forschner and Markus Heyn, who is responsible for the largest division with the automotive business, three of the four members who answered questions from journalists on Tuesday evening have only been in their position since the turn of the year.
All three are Bosch homegrown products.
The fourth, HR manager Filiz Albrecht, has also only been in office since the beginning of 2021.
In total, the management currently has six members.
No new alignment
Hartung attaches great importance to continuity with his predecessor: He agrees with his predecessor Denner on important issues.
"I have exactly the same opinion as Volkmar Denner," he says, for example, about the focus on electromobility.
In contrast to Denner, however, he refrained from criticizing EU transport policy.
The rules are what they are.
He supports the EU's Green Deal.
He did not announce a new direction.
He cannot yet say whether anything will change in which sectors Bosch is active.
Just this much: “It doesn’t have to be that we downsize it.
It's also possible that we'll expand that.” He also didn't rule out acquisitions.
In a speech to journalists, Hartung, who previously headed the auto parts division, focused on sustainability.
Bosch was the first global industrial company to achieve carbon neutrality at all of its locations.
Now the focus is on CO2 emissions in the supply chain.
This is usually many times larger.
By 2030, Bosch wants to “reduce CO2 emissions along our supply chain by 15 percent,” said Hartung.
Compared to his predecessor, who always emphasized efforts in the field of artificial intelligence, he focused heavily on mobility issues.
Chips for chips machines are missing
It is fitting that he went into detail about the chip crisis, which he was already dealing with in his position as head of the automotive supplier business.
"We can't get enough semiconductors this year either," he said.
However, like so many in the industry, he is hoping for improvement in the second half of the year.
"We hope that in 2023 we will be able to work the way we want to again."
Bosch not only processes a lot of semiconductors, but also produces them itself. Last year, the group inaugurated a new semiconductor factory in Dresden.
In the current year, the company wants to invest 400 million euros to expand capacities, said Hartung.
In some places, however, even the computer chips for the new machines that would be used in the production of the chips were missing.
CFO Forschner did not want to quantify how much Bosch lost sales due to the lack of semiconductors.
Hartung praised the EU's new "Chips Act", which intends to support semiconductor production in Europe with more than 40 billion euros.
"This is a really good program." However, he warned that not only the chips in the smallest structures should be promoted, which the EU is currently relying on.
"You don't need that many of them in vehicles." In the end, there would have to be semiconductor factories that match the demand.
The outlook for the current year was cautious.
If there are no new disruptions in the business environment, sales growth is expected, said CFO Forschner.
The return should remain at the level of the previous year.
However, it was already remarkably low in 2021.
The operating result before taxes (EBIT) was 3.2 billion euros.
The EBIT margin increased from 2.8 to 4 percent.
"We are not satisfied with the return," said Bosch boss Hartung.
"We continue to aim for 7 to 7.5 percent."
Due to the business development, the number of employees has increased again, said Forschner.
Bosch hired 6,700 additional associates around the world.
At the end of 2021, there were 401,300 employees working for the technology group, a good 130,000 of them in Germany.