BADEN-BADEN (dpa-AFX) - The leasing specialist Grenke generated slightly less new business last year than recently forecast. New leasing business increased by 12.3 percent to 2.58 billion euros, as the company announced in Baden-Baden on Thursday. Most recently, CEO Sebastian Hirsch had expected the lower half of the forecast corridor of 2.6 to 2.8 billion euros. According to the press release, Hirsch spoke of a successful year, "even if we only just achieved our forecast for new business". In the new year, new business should continue to pick up as already targeted. The SDax-listed share fell by 1.2 percent in the morning.

The share has recovered somewhat in recent months after a prolonged downward trend. After rising from below EUR 20 at the beginning of 2023 to over EUR 32 at the beginning of May, the share price fell back below EUR 20 by the end of October. The last time it reached over EUR 25 again was in December. The share was trading just below this mark on Thursday.

The strongest quarter of the year produced solid figures for new business, wrote Warburg analyst Marius Fuhrberg. The trend of strong growth in Northern and Eastern Europe continued in the fourth quarter, followed by Southern Europe. The decline in the German-speaking region is also due to the high level.

Grenke CEO Hirsch intends to use the momentum from the final quarter "to realize our ambitions for new leasing business of at least three billion euros in the new year." For the analysts at Pareto Securities, this sounds challenging, as it implies faster new business growth of 16 percent than in the previous year.

Grenke increased the margin of the so-called contribution margin 2 by 0.4 percentage points to 16.5 percent in the past year. The margin is a measure of the profitability of new business. Strong profitability is "even more important than pure volume growth", said Hirsch in view of the rise in interest rates. According to earlier statements, Grenke can only pass on rising interest rates to the mostly small and medium-sized customers whose business equipment is financed through leasing.

Warburg expert Fuhrberg assumes that Grenke will be able to achieve its medium-term margin target of 17 percent this year with the prospect of falling interest rates./men/lew/jha/