Ströer: General Meeting passes the resolution of significantly higher dividend of EUR 0.70 after extremely successful fiscal year 2015

At today’s ordinary General Meeting of Ströer SE & Co. KGaA in Cologne, all resolutions proposed by the Supervisory Board and the Board of Management were adopted with approval rates of around 70% and above. More than 42 million shares (or more than 76%) of Ströer SE & Co. KGaA’s capital stock were represented at the General Meeting.

In line with the proposal by the Management Board and the Supervisory Board to give shareholders an adequate share in successful business development today’s General Meeting passes the resolution of paying a dividend of 0.70 Euro (previous year 0.40 Euro) per dividend-bearing share.

The actions of the members of the Management Board and the Supervisory Board were approved for fiscal year 2015. In accordance with the recommendation by the Supervisory Board, the General Meeting appointed Ernst & Young GmbH, Cologne, as the auditor of the financial statements and the consolidated financial statements for 2016.

At today’s ordinary General Meeting, Anette Bronder and Vicente Vento Bosch were reappointed as members of the Supervisory Board of Ströer SE & Co. KGaA. 

All shareholder representatives were reelected as members of the Supervisory Board, which will be expanded up to 12 members: Christoph Vilanek Dirk Ströer, Ulrich Voigt, Julia Flemmerer, Anette Bronder and Vicente Vento Bosch.

After an excellent financial year 2015 and a strong start to the year 2016, Ströer presented the best result in history. The overall good business development is being primarily driven by the strong revenue growth in the Digital segment where the acquisitions made in the past months, along with organic growth, had a significant effect. This upward trend was bolstered by the continued positive development in the OOH Germany segment where business remains very robust.

Ströer recorded a very pleasing development in adjusted earnings for the financial year 2015, which rose sharply and almost doubled to EUR 106m. The result underlines the profitable growth that the company has embarked on two years ago.

The growth in operating activities also had a positive impact on the financial position. Within the space of a year, Ströer also considerably reduced its leverage ratio (net debt to Operational EBITDA) from 1.9 to 1.1, the lowest ratio since going public.

“2015 was an excellent year for Ströer and we got off to a remarkable and very positive start in fiscal year 2016. All our financial KPIs have developed exceptionally well, and all segments are contributing to this very good business performance”, says Udo Müller, CEO of Ströer. “We have succeeded in carrying this positive momentum from 2015 into the current fiscal year. We are confident that this positive momentum will continue in the second quarter and in the full year. We are confirming our current guidance of Operational EBITDA of more than EUR 280m and consolidated revenue of between EUR 1.1b and EUR 1.2b for 2016.”