Renishaw – Reflections on 2020 and 2021
Renishaw’s financial year ending June 2020 was challenging, even before the onset of the pandemic, leading to difficult decisions to preserve cash and protect the longer-term health of the business. This included no dividend payments, restructuring and a resizing programme, which regrettably led to some redundancies across the business.
Our first quarter results for the period ending September 2020, showed a mixed picture with revenue growth in our APAC region due to a recovery in the semiconductor market, but revenue in our EMEA and Americas regions reduced due to the ongoing uncertainty caused by the pandemic and weaker demand, particularly in the aerospace and automotive sectors. The actions to reduce our cost had however benefitted profit before tax. Our half-year results are published on February 4th.
Despite the challenges faced due to a continuing uncertain macroeconomic backdrop and the pandemic, we are in a strong financial position and therefore continue to invest in the development of new products and applications, along with targeted investment in production, and sales and marketing facilities around the world.
We have also just announced our early careers intakes for 2021, with a record 70 positions available for our graduate programmes, plus 51 apprenticeships (including degree-apprenticeships) and 60 placements. This represents a significant investment in Renishaw’s future and some great opportunities across the region to start a career in engineering.
The pandemic has changed many things forever, including attitudes to homeworking. Since last March, the most significant change for Renishaw has been that many of our employees have spent most of the time working from home. We believe this change will benefit our business and the wider community into the future, and homeworking will be fully implemented after things return to ‘normal’ depending on the nature of an employee’s role and the needs of the business.
