Navigating a challenging year with a focus on long-term growth

Financial results full year 2024:

• Revenue: €4,949 million
• Normalized EBITDA of €243 million
• Normalized EBITDA margin of 4.9% of revenue
• Operating Cash Flow of €235 million, representing in a cash conversion rate of 97%

In 2024, we operated in a persistently challenging market environment – particularly during the first half of the year.

Ongoing weak demand, price deflation, and elevated operating cost inflation weighed on our overall performance. The DACH region, in particular, faced tough market conditions and intensified price competition amid sustained low demand.

In response to the market challenges, we maintained a stringent focus on strengthening operational discipline through tight cost management, inventory optimization, as well as targeted procurement initiatives to protect our margins and offset volume decline.

While some regions remained under pressure, others showed encouraging momentum. Spain and Portugal delivered strong organic growth in 2024, and markets in the Netherlands and Belgium returned to growth in the last part of the year.

Investing in long-term growth

We continued to invest decisively in the future of our business – improving operational excellence and our IT and Digital infrastructure, as well as enhancing customer journeys through increased digitization.

We continued to grow our footprint to drive market share growth, adding eight new locations to our branch network – reinforcing our commitment to provide customers with expert and trusted service.

At the same time, we strengthened our operational capabilities by opening a brand new automated distribution center for Sanitary, Heating and Plumbing in Berlin/Germany and we officially launched a new central warehouse for timber in Bulle/Switzerland – further improving our cost-to-serve and enhancing the service level to customers.

BME’s strategic growth journey also continued through targeted acquisitions. We completed seven successful transactions in 2024, bringing the total to 36 since becoming an independent company at the end of 2019.

Despite tough market conditions, our teams stayed focused, driving real progress toward our ambition to lead on sustainability in our industry. Last year, we successfully reduced our carbon footprint by 11% (compared to 2023), strengthened our network of responsible suppliers, and expanded our offering of sustainable products.

“While we faced a tough year with declining demand, we’ve continued to invest with discipline and purpose – strengthening our operations, expanding our footprint, and staying close to our customers. All of our efforts on operational excellence initiatives have improved the resilience of the business and this positions us well to leverage our scale and expertise and accelerate profitable growth as soon as markets recover.”- Remco Teulings – Group CEO

Looking ahead, BME remains confident in the trajectory of our business, underpinned by strong structural drivers that support a solid mid- to long-term outlook: a persistent housing shortage, ageing housing stock, increasing demand for energy-efficient renovations, lower interest rates, and broader macroeconomic and climate-related opportunities.

With a strong foundation and team in place and with market conditions gradually improving over the past quarters, BME is well positioned to leverage its scale and expertise to accelerate growth again.