Coke oven battery at JFE Steel, Japan; Credit: Paul Wurth

Under the chairmanship of Michel Wurth, the Ordinary General Meeting of shareholders of Luxembourg company Paul Wurth was held on 12 May 2020 to approve, among other things, the financial statements for the year 2019.

Given the challenging economic environment, which prevailed already for most of 2019, the group’s reported level of new contracts and its financial result 2019 reflected a good performance. This achievement is considered all the more important today to mitigate the significant global economic fall-out as a consequence of the outbreak of the novel corona virus in the first months of 2020.

And yet 2020 should have been a special year for Paul Wurth, marking the 150th anniversary of the company. With a year of delay, this important milestone anniversary will be celebrated adequately next year in a festive way.

Concerning the results for the financial year 2019, Paul Wurth's turnover for the year was €479.2 million, up by 12.8% from the level reported in 2018. The company closed the financial year with a net profit of €14.4 million (compared with €14.1 million in 2018). 

In 2019, Paul Wurth continued and accelerated its initiatives towards developing environmentally friendly and climate-neutral solutions for the steel industry, which will undergo a deep transformation process in the years and decades to come under the impact of the 2015 Paris Climate Accord and the “Save the Climate” movement, which gained momentum last year.

By offering CO2 reducing technologies, Paul Wurth’s immediate target is to help its customers reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve energy efficiency at their existing facilities, knowing that the move towards a completely new process route needs first to be scaled up and is extremely capital-intensive for steel producers. In this regard, another valuable reference order for coke oven gas injection at the blast furnace can be reported from Rogesa, Dillingen. In a longer-term perspective of carbon-free steel production, Paul Wurth took an important step with a 20% participation in the German cleantech company Sunfire GmbH.