EANS-News: The Salzgitter Group masters the challenges of the financial crisis with assuredness

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Salzgitter (euro adhoc) - 2009 will go down as one of the most difficult
financial years in the 150-year history of the Salzgitter Group. During the
first nine months the Group had to absorb a dramatic slump in demand for rolled
steel products, among other occurrences. Thanks, on the one hand, to the sound
and broad business base and the healthy financial position of the company and,
on the other, to a program of swiftly implemented urgent measures to stabilize
performance, all the challenges posed by the crisis were mastered with aplomb.
With the onset of economic recovery, the Group was again generating a positive
operating profit in the fourth quarter.

External sales by Division (EUR million):

FY 2009   (FY 2008)
Steel                       1,673.6   (3,001.7)
Trading                     3,038.7   (5,621.7)
Tubes                       2,044.6   (2,172.5)
Services                      302.9     (519.3)
Technology                    717.6   (1.037.9)
Other                          40.6     (146.0)
Group                       7,818.0  (12,499.2)

Earnings before tax by Division (EUR million):

FY 2009   (FY 2008)
Steel                        -373.5     (545.6)
Trading                      -128.0     (150.8)
Tubes                         104.0     (311.8)
Services                        8.2      (23.9)
Technology                   -210.4       (3.8)
Other/Consolidation           103.3     (-32.5)
Group                        -496.5   (1,003.4)

As the tail-end effects of the financial crisis are still being felt in the
current year and cause jitteriness in the relevant sales and procurement
markets, providing a reliable, quantified outlook for sales and the result of
the Salzgitter Group is naturally not possible. It is, however, foreseeable that
there will be an improvement in the economic situation of most of the Group
companies. The recovery of these steel companies, which depends on capacity
utilization, should be able to partly compensate for a selling price-induced
lower result in the Tubes Division. We therefore expect our Group to generate a
positive pre-tax result in the double-digit million Euro range. There are
nonetheless considerable risks, as before: alongside the foreseeable increase in
the cost of raw materials, the recovery of the steel and mechanical engineering
markets is still subject to uncertainties.

As in recent years, we make reference to the fact that opportunities and risks
from currently unforeseeable trends in selling prices, input materials and
capacity level developments, as well as changes in the currency parity, may
considerably affect performance in the course of the financial year 2010. The
resulting fluctuation in the consolidated pre-tax result may, as current events
show, be within a considerable range, either to the positive or to the negative.
The dimensions of this range become clear if one considers that, with around 10
million tons of steel products sold by the Steel, Trading and Tubes divisions,
an average EUR 50 contraction in the margin per ton is sufficient to cause a
variation in the annual result of more than EUR 500 million.

More information can be found in the full press release published today (see
www.salzgitter-ag.de).

OTS-ORIGINALTEXT PRESSEAUSSENDUNG UNTER AUSSCHLIESSLICHER INHALTLICHER VERANTWORTUNG DES AUSSENDERS - WWW.OTS.AT | CNE

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