Riber: revenues down, order book up
2022 full-year revenues of €27.8m strongly impacted by difficulties sourcing electronic components
French MBE company Riber has reported its full-year revenues for 2022. These came to €27.8m, down 11 percent from 2021, with the following breakdown: 23 percent in Europe, 72 percent in Asia, and 5 percent in North America.
MBE systems revenues came to €14.8m, down 15 percent. Six MBE systems, including four production units, were delivered over the year, compared with eight systems, including four production units, in 2021.
Despite the company’s efforts to resolve the supply chain disruption affecting electronic components, the delivery of two research systems, representing an amount of €2.9m, had to be deferred to 2023.
Revenues for services and accessories totaled €13m, down 6 percent versus a historically high basis for comparison. This change primarily reflects the deferral to 2023 of the delivery of a major accessories order because of supply tensions and delays.
Order book developments
Orders for MBE systems are up 212 percent to €24.6m and include 11 systems. This order book does not include the option to buy announced on June 8, 2022 covering four production machines for which the firm orders will be confirmed in 2023 when the export license is obtained.
Orders for services and accessories are temporarily down at the end of 2022.
Outlook
Factoring in the deferral of two machine deliveries to 2023 and the increase in the order book, Riber is forecasting 2023 full-year revenues of approximately €40m, up by at least 35 percent compared with 2022.
With very buoyant market trends and a strong prospect pipeline, the order intake levels are expected to remain robust in 2023.
Appointment of Christian Dupont
Riber has appointed Christian Dupont as a member and vice-chairman of the company’s executive board from February 6, 2023. Dupont’s role will be in particular to further strengthen Riber’s commercial development and marketign.
After graduating as an engineer from EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), Dupont, 59, began his career in 1988 with Texas Instruments, where in 1992 he helped create its Wireless business unit, which became the wireless semiconductor market leader for 15 years. He was a marketing manager before being appointed to head up the business unit in Dallas and Nice, where he was in charge of the wireless business unit in Europe.
From 2007 to 2010, he was CEO of the startup Varioptic (electro-optics), which was sold to Parrot, before serving until 2015 as CEO of PoLight in Norway (MEMS Auto-Focus), which listed on Oslo’s stock market.From 2015 to 2021, he was chairman and CEO of CEO-CF, a collaboration platform for executives from high-growth European technology companies. In 2018, he helped restructure and refinance Dolphin Integration (semiconductors) as its CEO. From 2019, he was CEO of Digitsole (digital health).
