Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers reports increased revenue and strong results for 2009
finance.yahoo.com
"We continued to execute our long-term growth strategy and are pleased with our performance in 2009 in the face of challenging conditions in several of our major markets," said Peter Blake, Ritchie Bros. CEO. "We made significant investments in the future of our company, opening seven new and replacement auction sites, growing our sales team by 14%, introducing new value-added services for our customers and improving our systems and processes, including development of a new sales force automation tool and piloting a timed auction system. We sold a record number of equipment items, registered record numbers of on-site and online bidders, including significant numbers of first time customers, sold a record amount of equipment to online bidders and conducted a number of successful auctions in frontier markets. Our efforts to control expenses and improve efficiency are reflected in our healthy adjusted net earnings growth."
Mr. Blake continued: "Our gross auction proceeds did not grow as expected in 2009, although we did see growth in some of our markets, such as Canada where we generated a 19% increase in local currency gross auction proceeds. In general, average equipment values at our auctions were lower than in 2008, and combined with a shift to more lower valued items, this diminished the impact of the 12% increase in items we sold in 2009. At the beginning of 2009 we expected a high volume of idle equipment to come to market but this did not happen. Equipment owners had the unusual situation of low interest rates and generally more accommodating lenders, so in the face of a high degree of uncertainty in the market and depressed equipment values, many equipment owners chose to hold on to their assets. It's hard to say exactly what 2010 has in store for Ritchie Bros. - precise visibility into the future is challenging for us at the best of times - and even though the results of our recent auctions have been very promising, the continuing uncertainty in equipment markets makes 2010 a tough year to predict. Like many other companies, we have been impacted by the global recession; however, we remain focused on executing our strategy and generating earnings growth over the long term." |
