The "encouraging trends" in Suez's European waste management division continued to hold, CEO Jean-Louis Chaussade reported at the release of the French environmental services concern's semi-annual earnings report today in Paris. The division generated revenues of €3.047bn, representing an increase of 0.4 per cent compared to the prior-year half. Earnings before interest and tax (Ebit) improved by around 4 per cent to €137m.
The division's organic revenue growth in the first half of 2017 lay at 2.7 per cent, driven primarily by higher prices for scrap metal and recovered paper. Suez achieved an organic increase in sales of 4.6 per cent on its home market of France. Organic revenue growth for waste management and recycling activities in the Germany/Benelux region stood at 2.8 per cent.
Following the commissioning of three new waste-to-energy plants in the UK and another in the Polish city of Poznań, Suez was now operating 55 wte plants. The concern expects to treat more than 9 million tonnes of waste in these plants in 2017, up from 8.5 million tonnes in 2016. Suez predicts that it will sell around 7 TWh of energy over the course of the calendar year. This figure excludes energy from biogas and from solid recovered fuel (SRF).
