Eindhoven, the Netherlands – Signify (Euronext: LIGHT), the world leader in lighting, today announced the company’s fourth quarter and full-year results 2018. “We continued to make solid progress with our simplification and cost reduction actions in 2018, resulting in a substantial increase in profitability and strong free cash flow delivery. In line with our strategy, our growing profit engines – LED, Professional and Home - have strongly contributed to these improvements and our LED-based sales have grown by 2.5%, now representing 71% of total revenues,” said CEO Eric Rondolat. “While market conditions are challenging, we continue to focus on new growth platforms to strengthen our market leadership and progressively improve our growth profile. With our proposal to increase our dividend to EUR 1.30 per share, we will have returned more than EUR 1 billion to shareholders over the last three years. Looking forward, I’m confident we have built a solid foundation to deliver in 2019 on the mid-term targets set at the time of the IPO.”
Outlook
In 2019, our growing profit engines (LED, Professional and Home combined) are expected to deliver a comparable sales growth in the range of 2 to 5%. Our cash engine, Lamps, is expected to decline at a slower pace than the market, in the range of -21 to -24% on a comparable basis. For total Signify, we aim to reach an Adjusted EBITA margin in 2019 within the range of 11 to 13% set at the time of the IPO in May 2016. We expect free cash flow in 2019 to be above 5% of sales.
Financial calendar
February 26, 2019: Annual report 2018
April 26, 2019: First quarter results 2019
May 14, 2019: Annual General Meeting of Shareholders
July 26, 2019: Second quarter and half year results 2019
October 25, 2019: Third quarter results 2019
Conference call and audio webcast
Eric Rondolat (CEO) and Stéphane Rougeot (CFO) will host a conference call for analysts and institutional investors at 9:00 a.m. CET to discuss fourth quarter and full year results. A live audio webcast of the conference call will be available via the Signify Investor Relations website.
