ABB cautious amid Q2 profit slump
Swiss-Swedish engineering group ABB posted a 31 per cent drop in net income to $675 million (SFr719.5 million) in the second quarter of the year.
Sales fell by 12 per cent to $7.9 billion according to a company statement on Thursday. However, analysts say ABB’s continuing cost-cutting efforts helped limit a decline in profit.
“Factories within some units , such as power products, were running at full capacity to execute order backlog. This supported the earning before interest and taxes figure,” a company spokesman said.
The group remains cautious for the rest of the year as customers have hesitated over new spending on equipment.
ABB is expected to benefit from government stimulus packages designed to counter the economic slowdown, but the group said it was unable to forecast when these programmes would start to help ABB or when the availability of funding would improve.
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