A production stoppage at its Nastola headquarters associated with a Covid-19 outbreak and a change in IFRS accounting rules in April have made an additional dent into earnings at Raute. As a result, operating losses did not improve in 2021, as was projected at the beginning of the year; in fact, losses even became a little larger.
Preliminary figures published by Raute on 25 January show that net revenues increased as expected to €142m; this figure was around a quarter higher than in the preceding year. Russia remains the most important sales market for Raute with a share of a half. Raute booked an operating loss of €2.2m for the period, up from €1.9m in the previous year. Raute primarily attributed this deterioration in its earnings to changes in accounting for cloud-based IT systems adopted by IFRS in April. As a result, Raute had to report additional expenses for the ongoing introduction of a new IT system, which were supposed to be capitalised. This factor took a €2.9m bite out of earnings for 2021. The company also had to book retroactive charges of €0.9m for 2020.
