General Meeting of sia Abrasives Holding AG of 20 June 2000 (20/06/2000)
243 shareholders today attended the twenty-first ordinary general meeting of sia Abrasives Holding AG at the Stadtcasino in Frauenfeld. All the motions proposed by the Board of Directors were approved. Dividend per registered share was set at six Swiss francs gross.
Chairman of the Board Ernst Winkler welcomed 243 shareholders to the Stadtcasino in Frauenfeld for the first ordinary general meeting since the company went public last year. The 243 shareholders represented 381’174 votes or 50.82 percent of the total 750,000 registered shares. The general meeting approved the annual report, annual financial statements and consolidated financial statements for 1999 in the form presented.
sia Abrasives Holding AG closed the year with net earnings of CHF 10.9 million, which was markedly higher than for the previous year (1998: CHF 3.7 million). Together with retained earnings of CHF 3.1 million, the general meeting had net balance sheet income of CHF 14.0 million at its disposal. Dividend per registered share was set at CHF 6.- gross. Payment will be effected on 26 June 2000.
The vote of approval for the actions of the Board of Directors during the 1999 business year was unanimous.
Peter A. Schifferle, Chief Executive Officer of the sia Group and Managing Director, and Alexander Krebs, member of the Board of Directors, were confirmed in office for a period of three years, Christoph Weise, also a member of the Board of Directors, for a further term of one year. As planned, Yves Dudli did not stand for re-election after the successful completion of the company’s initial public offering.
PricewaterhouseCoopers AG, Winterthur, were confirmed in their duties as auditors to both sia Abrasives Holding AG and the sia Group for a further period of one year.
The results achieved during the 1999 business year together with those for the first three months of 2000 – namely more than twelve percent increase in net sales compared with the first quarter of 1999 – are extremely gratifying for sia Abrasives.
One major reason for this first-quarter growth for 2000 has been the launch of a new product line in the metal sector. The sia Group is targeting measures at expanding and strengthening its position in the highly competitive metalworking market. After extensive market tests, this spring has seen the "siabite” line for high-performance grinding introduced on a global scale. This is an abrasive that makes use of ceramic grain to ensure not only long service life but also top-quality surface finish for workpieces. This launch has exceeded all expectations, which is reflected in the fact that current orders in hand for siabite articles are already in excess of the sales forecast for the entire year.
sia Abrasives has also registered further successes on the ultra-fine front, with it already proving possible to fill orders for major customers in the German automotive industry. The way forward for sia Abrasives is also in product development. Thanks to a newly-developed coating technology, the company has succeeded in producing coated abrasive film on its own production facilities at Frauenfeld with a structure that allows precision surface of 9um. This advance in processing will lead to even better surface structures and results in applications where sia ultra-fine abrasives are used and enable sia Abrasives to develop new areas of application.
The extremely gratifying business experienced during the opening five months of the current year makes the group management of sia Abrasives optimistic that the sia Group will achieve double-digit sales growth over the year 2000 as a whole.
® Correct nomenclature for sia Abrasives Holding AG
As there are other companies and organizations that use the same abbreviation as our company, we would be grateful if you could help to avoid any misunderstandings by always writing our name as follows: sia Abrasives (never just sia by itself).
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