The Arineo Group continues its rapid growth and draws a positive balance for the 2021 fiscal year: it increased its sales by almost 42 percent to €31.73 million. In 2020, the group had posted a turnover of €22.41 million. “The increase is once again well above our ambitious planning. Our goal in 2021 was to achieve a sales growth of 20 percent over the previous year,” explains Dr. Marko Weinrich, management spokesman for the young Göttingen-based company.
The positive balance sheet is also reflected in the company’s credit rating. In February, Creditreform Braunschweig Göttingen Bruns & Harland GmbH & Co. KG certified Arineo GmbH’s excellent creditworthiness by awarding the Creditreform creditworthiness certificate (CrefoZert). This makes Arineo among the two percent of economically relevant companies in Germany that meet the strict criteria of the certification body.
As the company does not need the entire EBIT margin to secure its future and its planned growth, the 2021 operating result has been capped at 10 percent of turnover. “In our industry, an EBIT margin of 3 to 7 percent is common,” Weinrich said. “So we decided to artificially limit our EBIT margin and let our employees share in the success.” The company is aiming for a constant annual turnover growth of around 10 percent on a long-term average – but for 2022, an even higher turnover growth of at least €36 million is planned.
In order to realize these plans, the company must continue to increase staffing levels. At the end of 2021, the Arineo Group employed 280 people, almost 20 percent more than in December of the previous year. “By comparison, according to Bitkom, growth of 3.9 per cent is common in the IT services industry,” Weinrich elaborates. However, even this success was not enough to serve all of the company’s customer requests. Therefore, the company places a strong emphasis on training and offers its workforce a wide range of opportunities to work from home, on the move, or at one of its fourteen locations worldwide. Space for the planned growth is secured: in January, the company acquired a building plot on Maschmühlenweg, in Göttingen. Construction of the first office building, with at least 5,000 square meters of floor space, is scheduled to begin in late summer 2022. The 200 employees at the Göttingen site are expected to be able to christen their new offices at the end of 2023.