In the third quarter, Deutsche Brse achieved its best result to date, with record sales revenue of Euros 388.3 million euros and an EBIT of Euros 87.9 million euros.
The third-quarter profit is diminished by Euros 33 million due to a writedown on goodwill that resulted from the acquisition of the IT services company Entory AG. Excluding this exceptional item, the EBIT would amount to Euros 120.9 million euros, a record quarter.
Compared to the same quarter of last year (Q3/2001: 185.5 million euros), the sales revenue of Deutsche Brse Group more than doubled after consolidating the results of entory AG, Cedel International S.A. and Clearstream International S.A.. Sales revenue now contains external sales revenue and net interest income from banking business. Excluding the effects of Clearstream and entory acquisitions, underlying sales grew by 13 percent to 210 million euros versus the second quarter 2002. The reported earnings before interest and tax (EBIT) rose by 36 percent compared with the same quarter of last year (Q3/2001: 64.8 million euros).
Deutsche Brse’s chief financial officer Mathias Hlubek said: “Against the background of the results for the first nine months of the current business year, we are confident that we will achieve our projected growth and profitability targets for the year as a whole.” The positive impact of the complete takeover of the settlement and custody business of Clearstream, he said, is reflected especially in the strong rise in cash flow from operating activities, which more than doubled, to 169 million euros, year on year (Q3/2001: 78.5 million euros).
Eurex was the strongest segment in the Group again in the third quarter. The sales revenue, at 97.3 million euros, was 42 percent higher than in the same quarter of last year (Q3 2001: 68.5 million euros). The EBIT also rose again, more than doubling to 56.2 million euros (Q3 2001: 27.8 million euros). The segment’s EBIT margin, at 58 percent, demonstrates considerable scalability.
The sales revenue of the Xetra segment, at 53.5 million euros, was eight percent lower than last year’s third-quarter figure (Q3 2001: 58.2 million euros) with EBIT decreasing to 1.4 million euros. Especially the costs for the planned introduction of the Central Counterparty for equities trading in the first quarter of 2003, weighed on the quarterly result.
In the IT segment, the external sales revenue came to 41.1 million euros, 31 percent higher than the third-quarter figure in 2001. The EBIT declined to -1.5 million euros (Q3/2001: 20.5 million euros) due to the exceptional writedown on goodwill that arose on the acquisition of entory AG.
In the Information Products segment, sales revenue rose slightly by four percent to 28.6 million euros, with an EBIT that was about 2 percent higher, at 5.6 million euros. This was influenced by a write off amounting to 3.9 million euros for the development costs of a price discovery system for bonds.
In the Clearstream segment, sales revenue was 167.8 million euros and the EBIT 38.4 million euros after depreciation of goodwill amounting to 15.1 million euros.
The full report for Q3 is available on the internet under deutsche-boerse.com in the section about us/investor relations.