Today, BASF released its full-year report for 2024.
Despite a challenging market environment, BASF performed quite well thanks to the strong performance of our core businesses, where we leveraged our strong market positions to grow EBITDA before special items by 18 percent compared with 2023. Overall, EBITDA before special items for BASF Group rose to €7.9 billion, marking a 2 percent increase.
I am also pleased to highlight that BASF attained a free cash flow of ~€750 million, exceeding our forecast range of €0.1 to €0.6 billion. This was the result of lower than projected capital expenditures and our disciplined approach to managing net working capital.
Furthermore, we are on track to deliver cost savings of ~€2.1 billion by the end of 2026. At the end of last year, we achieved a total annual cost reduction run rate of €1 billion.
In line with our previous announcement, we will propose a dividend of €2.25 per share for the business year 2024 to the Annual Shareholders’ Meeting. Based on the year-end share price, this offers an attractive dividend yield of more than 5 percent.
We remain fully committed to advancing our #WinningWays strategy. In this context, we announced the signing of the sale of our decorative paints business in Brazil, a business with a strong team and brand which, however, has limited synergies with the rest of our portfolio. Moreover, in the second half of this year, we will begin the start up of our new Verbund site in Zhanjiang, China, where construction is currently progressing on time and within budget.
You can find the full report at https://lnkd.in/erYAs-tt
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