Hexagon’s financial plan updated at Capital Markets Day

Hexagon AB, a leading global provider of design, measurement and visualisation technologies, held a Capital Markets Day (CMD) in Las Vegas, Nevada, and updated its commentary around the operational progress for the company and the financial plan.

Hexagon launched its current financial plan in 2011 and it stretches until 2015. The sales target of EUR 3.5bn and the EBIT margin target of 25 per cent are to be reached through a combination of organic growth and acquisitions.

Since the launch of the plan Hexagon has reported solid organic growth although slightly below the long-term target of eight per cent. Contribution from acquisitions has so far been limited but activity has recently picked up evidenced by the seven acquisitions already announced in 2014.

The underlying EBIT margin improvement has been in line with internal projections, but currency movements has had a negative impact of approximately one percentage point on the reported EBIT margin.

As a consequence of the above the sales target of EUR 3.5bn and the EBIT margin target of 25 per cent remain unchanged but are pushed forward one year to 2016.

At the CMD, Hexagon put focus on its ability to grow twice the rate of GDP and elaborated on growth opportunities in the coming years, such as:

• Product releases within Metrology (SIMS 360°, HP-O and MMS) which will leverage on advances in sensor and software capabilities
• Geosystems’ ambition of selling imagery content as a service (CaaS), leveraging on recent M&A (Aibotix, AHAB, NWG, Geosoft S.r.l., Tridicon) and improvements in sensor capabilities
• Intergraph PP&M’s revolutionary SmartPlant Cloud and SmartPlant Fusion as examples of how improved management of big data can meet operational challenges for Owner Operators in a range of fields

Hexagon also underlined the importance of acquisitions in its solution-centric strategy, and exemplified this by strategy walkthroughs of the areas Hexagon Mining and Smart Agriculture.