The world’s largest commercial heat treater, Bodycote released their financial results for the year ending December 31 2019 earlier today and as always they make for fascinating reading. Fascinating because as the world’s only truly global heat treater their results give us an insight into the heat treating industry around the world. For instance the company mentions a slowdown in the European auto industry,  investments in growing markets such as Eastern Europe (Slovakia to be exact) and Scandinavia, investments in “Hipping” in 2020 and the progress of new locations in the US. In short if you want to know which geographic areas are growing or shrinking in terms of heat treating, which industries are seeing growth and which aren’t or which thermal processing technologies are growing there can be no better source in the world than Bodycote. The full financial summary is available at https://www.bodycote.com/

Operational highlights:

-Resilient margin3 of 18.7% despite some tough market conditions – significant actions taken to reduce costs 

-Civil Aerospace revenues up 17%

-Specialist Technologies revenues up 3%, continuing to outperform Classical Heat Treatment (-4%)

-Emerging Markets’ revenues up 5%

-Strong free cash flow conversion of 91%7

-£61m expansionary investment in strategic growth areas in 2019 

-£154m acquisition of Ellison Surface Technologies strengthens aerospace business and Specialist Technologies; expected to complete Q1.

-Full year ordinary dividend 20.0p, up 5.3%