Outlook to the future

Safety First

Building a safety culture that prevents accidents remains the number one priority within ROTO. Providing a safe work environment where all our Family members feel safe to be who they are and where they are is central to our ROTO Family.

All Business Units have carried out programmes on safety culture, based on the Dupont Bradley Curve. After the zero measurement, all Business Units are working on their improvement plans, which will lead to numerous actions. This will be followed by a second measurement, planned for late 2024, which will show whether and which improvements have been realised. With the weaving tool, exoskeletons and mover, new innovative methods have been introduced to improve physical working conditions and heavy lifting in particular. This journey will continue as part of our ambitions regarding our core themes People, Sustainability and Innovation.

People

With an ageing workforce and more complex recruitment, we continue investing in labour conditions and ﬁnding new ways of recruitment. We stimulate our Family members to grow and develop themselves by investing in training and education through our newly initiated and existing internal academies or otherwise. We do not expect the number of Family members to grow signiﬁcantly in 2024.

Instability in Europe

As the war in Ukraine continues, we regret the impact on the lives of so many. We are following developments in this volatile world on a daily basis and are doing our utmost to stay on track for our Family members and the other members and stakeholders of the ROTO Ecosystem.

Sustainability

Despite infrastructural challenges, we continue to align our goals with the seventeen SDGs of the United Nations and adapt to meet the ESG requirements. Projects for energy efﬁciency at all locations are contributing to the CO2 emissions goals. Awareness of these topics is recognised group-wide in the KPIs that have been developed for all eight core themes. These KPIs are our compass for navigating the Business Unit’s performance.

Marketing and sales

Especially for Business Units short of volumes and facing high levels of competition, it remains important to develop new markets and align their strategic sales and marketing goals with changed and changing market conditions.

Innovation and digitalisation

ROTO encourages its Business Units and Family members to engage in research and development, to collaborate on new ideas or solutions with internal and external stakeholders and partners and to experiment with new techniques in order to improve our way of working or at least learn new ways to improve. These activities are not related to systematic scientiﬁc exploration of new products and services but are part of our continuous innovation and digitalisation projects.

Investments

The main investments in 2024 are regular replacements in addition to sustainability investments related to safety and environmental key focus points. Investments by each Business Unit are aimed at further development, leading to investments in ERP software initiatives and the further development of operational ERP systems to beneﬁt from a more digitalised working environment. A few larger investment projects are in the finalisation stage, and because of the extended duration of these projects’ implementation processes, complete finalisation is not expected in 2024 and will partly continue in 2025. Therefore, the budgeted capital expenditure for 2024 amounts to € 12.4 million (2023: € 15.5 million).

Budget

As 2023 proved to be a moderate year, the start of 2024 continues at the same level and is slightly behind budgeted expectations. The 2024 budget is challenging but not unrealistic as it still partly depends on material prices, social and economic developments and incidents that might introduce new dynamics and uncertainties. As always, we can expect new challenges but we are confident that our Leadership Team will cope with them when necessary.

The budget aims for a positive result, a depreciation level of approximately € 10.1 million (2023: € 9.5 million), an expected working capital that is almost equal to the level of 2023 and sufﬁcient cash ﬂow to ﬁnance the planned investments from our own resources.

ROTO’s solvency and liquidity position is strong and provides a solid financial foundation from which it can be further developed.

Economic expectations

Expectations for economic developments are uncertain due to price fluctuations of key commodities, energy supply and the availability of skilled personnel, which will also be key factors.