MUNICH, GERMANY—Rohde & Schwarz said incoming orders surpassed the €2 billion mark for the first time in the company’s 80-year history for the fiscal year from July 2012 to June 2013. The company said it slightly improved its leading position in Europe, and achieved significant gains in Asia and the United Statees. All four Rohde & Schwarz business fields contributed to the successful results.
Incoming orders increased by 8.7 percent over the previous fiscal year to €2.04 billion. Revenues reached €1.9 billion, an increase of 4.8 percent. At the end of the fiscal year, the company had 9,300 employees, as compared with 8,700 a year earlier.
Rohde & Schwarz is based on four main strategic pillars: Test and measurement, broadcasting, secure communications, radiomonitoring and radiolocation. Wireless communications T&M was again the biggest contributor to the company’s performance, thanks to the continuing strong growth on the smartphone market, including LTE devices. The entire market for smart connected devices, which includes PCs and tablets as well as smartphones, continues to perform outstandingly well. This resulted in full order books and the highest level of production capacity utilization in the company’s history.
Together with its subsidiaries ipoque and SwissQual, Rohde & Schwarz offers T&M solutions for the lifecycle of a wireless communications network from a single source. Manfred Fleischmann, President and CEO of Rohde & Schwarz, states: “Network operators benefit from coordinated T&M solutions and have just one point of contact. This is unmatched on the market, and has enabled us to achieve stronger growth in this segment than our competitors.”
Rohde & Schwarz also performed well in the broadcasting business field. Even though the digital transmitter market is nearly saturated in many countries, Rohde said it was able to expand its position in the terrestrial television broadcasting market with a new family of transmitters. Through its subsidiary Rohde & Schwarz DVS, Rohde & Schwarz also offers products for the studio segment and has added audio/video headends to its portfolio. As a result, Rohde & Schwarz is developing into a supplier of solutions along the entire broadcasting value chain, from post production in the studio to transmission of the broadcasting signal.
Both the secure communications and the radio-monitoring and radio-location business fields showed very strong gains in incoming orders as compared with the previous fiscal year. In the air traffic control segment, Rohde & Schwarz succeeded in winning a strategically important reference project. The company has been selected as the sole supplier of HF radios and voice communications systems for air traffic control services in Iceland and Ireland. In addition, Rohde & Schwarz launched a new generation of software defined radios at the end of 2012. The R&S SDTR is targeted at addressing the needs of the tactical communications market.
Manfred Fleischmann is confident about the perspectives for fiscal year 2013/2014: “We have built up our company based on the long-term view. It rests on an extremely solid foundation.”
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