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| With the aim of achieving a much improved group performance in the current fiscal year 2001, Drägerwerk AG had significantly stepped up its Medical Technology and Dräger ProTech GmbH restructuring and cost-abatement programs during the fourth quarter of 2000. Last October, corporate management had already announced that these restructuring efforts would lead to an eight-digit DM loss for the first time in the company's history. The measures now initiated and broadened are raising the restructuring expenditure for 2000 to a total of Euro 45 million, thus entailing an appreciable increase in the group's net loss to Euro 60 million for the past fiscal year.
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| The radical surgery includes the convergence of business units and sales territories, the jettisoning of unprofitable businesses (such as the construction of hospital containers), the reduction of warehousing costs and inventory levels, and the remolding of Dräger ProTech GmbH. Works council negotiations are being intensified on the subject of personnel retrenchments without undue hardship for the some 650 employees affected throughout the group. Instated are meantime more than 300 individual productivity enhancement measures some of which are beginning to bear fruit.
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| As emphasized by CEO Theo Dräger, the toughened restructuring measures are reason to reckon on a return to profitability in fiscal 2001 and thus regain stockholder confidence. Good examples of the group's inherent capability and the opportunities for the entire Dräger Group to improve its profitability are Dräger Sicherheitstechnik GmbH, Dräger Aerospace GmbH, Dräger Interservices GmbH, and Synematic GmbH all of which are successfully progressing to plan.
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| In fiscal 2000, Lübeck-based Drägerwerk AG increased group sales worldwide by 10 percent to Euro 1.12 billion. Both Medical Technology and Safety Technology achieved higher sales worldwide and throughout their fields of business and sales territories. At more than 20 percent, the steepest gains were shown in Southeast Asia. In all, non-German sales climbed in 2000 to 69 percent (from 65 percent). Another heartening aspect is the 10-percent advance in order intake compared with 1999. |
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| Theo Dräger emphasized that the Dräger Group has an innovative and competitive product range. Alongside technology leadership, he added, the group's prime target was to achieve cost leadership and thus a marked improvement in the return on sales. |
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(c) Drägerwerk AG & Co. KGaA, 2007 |
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