Additional business with corona protective textiles brought the shirt manufacturer van Laack a healthy profit. The pre-tax profit in the 2019/20 financial year was 7.4 million euros, a year later it was 55.2 million euros, according to the company’s annual report. That is almost an eightfold increase. There was no information on net profit. Sales soared from 56.1 million to 203.2 million euros. Subsidiaries in Vietnam and Tunisia brought in additional pre-tax profits totaling six million euros. Van Laack’s fiscal year ends on April 30th.
After the outbreak of the corona pandemic, the company quickly changed direction and offered, among other things, mouth and nose fabric masks, of which around 130 million were sold. Company boss and owner Christian von Daniels speaks to the dpa of an “exceptional year”: “We cannot do that economically.” It was possible to quickly switch production in the plants in Vietnam and Tunisia from clothing to protective masks and hospital gowns. At the beginning of this year, however, the state made it compulsory to wear FFP2 masks or surgical masks. Then the demand for the cloth masks collapsed.
In the meantime, the company from Mönchengladbach has further developed its fabric masks, according to its own information, and products with a higher protective function should come onto the market in the coming weeks.
Three quarters of sales in the 2020/21 financial year are attributable to the medical division, i.e. corona-related additional products such as masks and hospital gowns. “Without the medical division, losses in the past financial year could hardly have been avoided,” says the manager.
And how is the traditional clothing manufacturer’s business going? “Somewhat better again,” says von Daniels. In the first Corona year, the shirts were hardly in demand, now sales are picking up. “The days of jogging outfits in the home office are over, people want to be chic again at home and wear shirts or blouses.”
As of May 1, van Laack had 218 employees in Germany, 40 fewer than a year earlier. In addition, 400 people work in the Vietnamese plant and 700 in Tunisia. (Dpa)