RUEIL-MALMAISON, France — Schneider Electric announced its fourth quarter revenues and full year results for the period ending December 31, 2015.
Jean-Pascal Tricoire, Chairman and CEO, commented: “In a challenging environment, we deliver record high revenues and profit, a stable margin in organic terms, and a strong growth in cash flow. Looking by business, Buildings & Partner and IT strengthen their global leadership and deliver solid results, Infrastructure is turning the corner, improving its profitability, and Industry is on track to recover its margin and shows great resilience despite weakness in some of its end markets. All this demonstrates the robustness of our business model based on the largest worldwide network of partners further enhanced by our balanced exposure to both end-markets and geographies. Moreover this illustrates our capability to quickly adapt to a volatile and challenging environment.
The second year of Invensys integration reaches all synergy targets and is ahead of schedule. Despite significant headwinds, Invensys also delivers a solid performance and successfully ramps down China nuclear project execution. The success of this integration demonstrates our capability to bring on board new entities and drive value creation from acquisitions.
2015 is also a year we strengthen the foundations of our businesses. We dispose of several non-core assets to optimize our portfolio and accelerate our cost optimization, delivering~€700m in savings .
In line with our commitments to our shareholders, we invest €0.6bn on share buybacks in 2015 and propose a 2015 dividend of €2 per share, an increase of 4% vs. 2014. We now upgrade our targeted buyback to a total of €1.5bn over 2015-2016.
Our priorities for this year are margin improvement by working on our costs, growing our partner’s network through the launch of many new integrated offers, accelerating services and software, and increasing selectivity on projects focusing on our sectors of expertise.
In 2016, we expect continued growth in Western Europe and the construction market in the U.S. At the same time we see headwinds from O&G, overall weakness in the U.S. industry markets, difficulties in China though to a lesser degree than in 2015 and mixed trends in the rest of new economies. Additionally, we will face material FX headwinds from several new economies’ currencies. Therefore, we target organic revenue growth to be flat to down low single-digit, impacted by higher selectivity on project activities and a margin improvement of +20bps to +60bps before negative FX impact.”
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