Letter to shareholders

Dear shareholders, customers, partners, and friends of the KION Group,

Our company operates in a very exciting industry: We strongly benefit from global megatrends: Increasing urbanization and shortage of labor in many industries, technological innovation, automation, digitalization and artificial intelligence are driving our business. And there’s increasing demand globally for speed in delivery and full traceability throughout the supply chain. We address these trends with our tailor-made solutions and product portfolio for our customers on a global scale.

We have made very good progress in both operating segments and on KION level since the difficult year 2022, which was impacted by inflation and severe supply chain disruptions. Our operational and commercial agility measures have proven to be successful, and 2024 was a strong year for us: We were quickly able to return the adjusted EBIT margin of the segment Industrial Trucks & Services to 10.0 percent in 2023 and 10.7 percent in 2024 while the margin of the segment Supply Chain Solutions has been continuously improving as we work through the legacy backlog and reap the benefits of the project management improvements and the growing service business. This together with the market eventually returning to growth should ensure Supply Chain Solutions return to double-digit adjusted margins.

In an environment of macroeconomic and geopolitical challenges and constant change, we have proven our resilience. KION shareholders will benefit: The Executive Board and Supervisory Board of KION GROUP AG will propose a dividend of €0.82 (previous year: €0.70) per share at the Annual General Meeting on May 27, 2025. All KION teams around the world contributed to this success.

The world and our markets are changing fast. We are at a pivotal moment in KION’s history: we create a company that is even more agile and resilient for the benefit of all our stakeholders. To prepare now for the next, we worked on various exciting projects during 2024. For example, KION designed a new strategy (‘Playing to Win’).

KION is becoming the Supply Chain Solutions Company

Our people’s passion is innovating, automating, and orchestrating solutions for our customers’ supply chains. We are making automation easily accessible and scalable – from partial to full. We are providing intelligent industrial trucks, automation solutions, software and services for smooth material flows. With ‘Playing to Win’, KION is becoming the Supply Chain Solutions Company.

Through our commitment to Innovation and Growth, we enhance our business within our two operational segments by offering even more customer-centric products and regional expansion. Furthermore, we strengthen our presence in the growing automation market by focusing decisively on innovative technologies and solutions.

Sustainable Performance underlines our dedication to consistently enhancing profitability and competitiveness, paving the way for future investments. Our technology organization (CTO) will prioritize initiatives aimed at accelerating new innovation time-to-market and reducing product costs. In product development, we are strengthening cross-brand collaboration, particularly in areas like automated forklift trucks and autonomous mobile robots.

Organizational Development is dedicated to the further activation of groupwide management principles which are ingrained in our business and HR processes to support our strategic goals. We embrace an agile mindset, working quickly and with focus to find pragmatic, and creative solutions.

Playing to win, we push the boundaries of our industry, strengthen our thought leadership role, and leverage AI-driven solutions as an integral part of our strategy to optimize our customers’ supply chains and increase their productivity.

KION is reshaping the warehouse of the future

In 2024, we worked with high intensity on our cooperation with NVIDIA and Accenture. We are the first in our industry to adopt NVIDIA’s physical AI, creating a vision for warehouses that are part of a smart agile system, evolve with the world around them, and can handle nearly any supply chain challenge. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas at the beginning of 2025, we announced first results: KION will be able to define ideal set-ups for new warehouses and continuously enhance existing facilities with Mega, an NVIDIA Omniverse blueprint for large-scale industrial digital twins. This includes a digital twin powered by physical AI – AI models that embody principles and qualities of the physical world – to improve the performance of intelligent warehouses that operate with automated forklifts, smart cameras and the latest automation and robotics solutions.

We are reinventing warehouse automation. In essence, the warehouse of the future will create an environment where both human workers and machines can collaborate seamlessly and safely. It predicts, visualizes and adapts to potential issues and generates data-driven insights for operators. This ultimately helps us design warehouses that are not only more efficient but also more resilient.

We are close to our customers in all regions around the world

KION’s two operating segments are driving growth by aligning closely with the demands of their regional and local markets. In 2024, we expanded our capacities and our sales and service network in the APAC and Americas regions to be well prepared for all geopolitical scenarios. We expanded the new Supply Chain Solutions plant and integrated technology center in Jinan, China. Additionally, investments were made to expand the industrial truck plant at the Summerville, South Carolina, site. We enhance local in-house production while improving procurement, supply chain efficiency, and overall productivity.

In the EMEA region, the KION Automation Center Antwerp, Belgium, opened in October 2024 and is the Group’s center of excellence for automation solutions. By bringing various capacities of KION’s brands under one roof, we can now respond to market needs and deliver automation projects faster – more innovative and cost-effective. Our teams design tailor-made automation solutions for our customers and support our regional sales teams.

Sustainable development and ambitions firmly in sight

In 2024, we also made substantial progress in our sustainability efforts: We strive to become not only a resource-efficient but also in all other aspects a sustainable company: In 2024, we continued to integrate sustainability into our core business and support our customers and suppliers in their sustainability journey by further sharpening our sustainability strategy and defining key levers in both operating segments Industrial Trucks & Services and Supply Chain Solutions. Our decarbonization efforts to date bore fruit when the Science-Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) successfully formally validated our climate targets and our commitment to achieve net-zero emissions across our entire value chain by 2050 at the latest.

KION’s progress in sustainability has not gone unnoticed. In addition to the confirmation of the EcoVadis rating ‘Gold’ for KION in 2024, we have been included in the Dow Jones Best-in-Class Europe Index for the first time as one of the longest-running sustainability benchmarks which is based on our best scoring to date in the rating S&P Global CSA. The Group sustainability statement of this annual report underscores our full commitment to sustainability transparency. On a voluntary basis we fully integrated the comprehensive regulations of the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).

Preparing Now for the Next

As already outlined, KION is at a pivotal moment in its history. European economies are struggling to gain momentum – this affects industries in Industrial Trucks & Services, where Chinese competitors have been improving their market position in the aftermaths of the recent pandemics, and Supply Chain Solutions felt the impact of the ongoing reluctance to invest in 2024.

To further drive our development of solutions in both segments to cover future requirements from our customers, we will develop an even more resilient and agile company. While internal programs to continuously improve product costs were already up and running throughout 2024 and will continue, further structural measures will address a more efficient setup in Europe in 2025.

KION is a strong force in redefining our industry: We harness the power of automation and robotics, of connectivity and artificial intelligence. Our markets are growing. We orchestrate supply chains and are a pillar of global trade – now and in the future.

Best regards

Rob Smith
Chief Executive Officer
KION GROUP AG