Ladies and gentlemen,

2022 was an extremely challenging year for the Melitta Group. It was dominated by commodity bottlenecks, significant price increases for energy, materials, and transport, and numerous uncertainties which dampened consumer sentiment in almost all relevant markets of the Melitta Group.

In view of this adverse macroeconomic environment, the Melitta Group performed well and closed the fiscal year 2022 with a satisfactory result. We successfully adapted to the changing conditions in good time and secured our ability to deliver throughout the year. The companies belonging to our Group were thus largely able to maintain their market positions and achieve many of the targets they set at the beginning of the year.

This success is first and foremost a testament to the efforts of our employees. In the past year, they once again displayed tremendous passion and foresight in developing new solutions. However, our continued market success is also the result of our long-standing cooperation with customers, suppliers, and other business associates – a cooperation based on mutual trust and respect.

The Melitta Group generated total sales of € 2,284 million in its fiscal year 2022. Compared to the previous year (€ 1,882 million), this represents revenue growth of 21.4 percent. This significant increase is primarily attributable to the Coffee business field, whose revenues increased from € 707 million in the previous year to € 1,058 million. Revenues of the Coffee Preparation and Household Products business fields rose by 5.9 and 3.4 percent, respectively.

These significantly higher sales revenues were mainly due to price increases necessitated by the massive hike in energy, material, and transport costs. By contrast, sales volumes were down in most of our operating divisions. The first-time consolidation of Roast Market GmbH and Corsino Corsini S.r.L., in which we acquired majority stakes in 2021, also had a positive impact on the revenues generated by the Melitta Group.

However, price increases introduced by almost all our operating divisions and our strict cost management were unable to fully offset significantly higher material, energy, and transport costs. This resulted in a noticeable burden on the Melitta Group’s earnings in 2022.

Our strategic alignment remains unchanged. Over the past few years, it has significantly enhanced our resilience and flexibility. It has opened up new perspectives and markets for us and strengthened our innovative capability and strength.

In the coming years, we will therefore continue to internationalize our activities and drive forward our transformation with regard to digitalization and sustainability. We currently see numerous opportunities for growth in our existing markets, but also in new ones. Key prerequisites for this growth are the further digitalization of our processes, products, and services, and the embedding of sustainability in all our business strategies. Given the increasing level of market uncertainty, we will continue to improve our agility, flexibility, and efficiency in the coming years and focus on products and services that meet and shape the current and future zeitgeist.

We therefore launched a wide array of new products and services again in 2022 and continued to refine our product ranges. In the Coffee business field, these included in particular new coffee blends, the expansion of our whole bean product range, the expansion of our craft coffee product range launched in 2021 (Melitta Manufaktur), as well as new offerings for the B2B market. In the Coffee Preparation business field, various filter coffeemakers and fully automatic coffee machines were upgraded and relaunched, and in the Household Products business field, several food wraps, containers, and bin liners were revised and improved, especially with regard to their sustainability performance. In addition, we rolled out a number of innovative products in our range for industrial clients.

We have made considerable progress with the sustainable alignment of our business activities: numerous initiatives and projects have been launched in all four of our value creation areas – Coffee and Coffee Preparation, Paper and Pulp, Plastics and Plastic Products, and Electrical Appliances – in order to achieve the future concepts we have adopted throughout the Group. Many of our structures and processes are therefore currently undergoing change – from the development of our products and procurement of raw materials, to our manufacturing and marketing processes.

Cooperation between the Group’s operating divisions has also intensified, not least as a result of the further integration of sustainability into our business strategies. We regard this increasingly close cooperation, the pooling of our strengths, and our strong cohesion based on a shared value culture as important success factors for the further development of our Group and intend to strengthen these aspects in the coming years.

We would like to express our sincere gratitude to all employees for their commitment, loyalty, and dedication to serving the current and future needs of our customers, day after day. We also thank our business partners for their loyalty, their reliability, and their trust in us.