location Dortmund, Date 2021.03.30

Internationally active IT consulting company Materna Information & Communications SE closed the 2020 business year, after the challenges due to Corona, very successfully and even achieved a record group turnover. The provisional group turnover for 2020 amounted to 355.1 million euros. In comparison to the previous year, this represents an increase of 9.6 percent (323.8 million euros in 2019) and the highest turnover in the 40-year history of this family-owned company – while also achieving its highest ever profitability. Their purely organic growth amounted to 13.5 percent as in the previous year Materna had already divested itself of various shareholdings and subsidiaries in order to streamline its portfolio.

For Materna, as for the whole economy, the year 2020 was dominated by the Corona pandemic. “We have helped numerous companies and public sector organizations to successfully drive their digitalization projects forward”, explains Martin Wibbe, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Directors for the Materna Group. Materna is specialized in delivering consulting and implementation services for digital transformations combining both business-process and technology consulting. Aspects of the portfolio showing particularly strong growth include the cloud, application modernizations, cyber security combined with setting up Security Operation Centers (SOC), service management and end-to-end process consulting for SAP.

The fact that Materna and its services are true leaders is verified by the analysts from ISG: “As a partner for German companies, Materna can certainly contribute significantly to the successful implementation of digitalization projects.“ (ISG Provider Lens Report on Enterprise Service Management).

In addition, last year Materna also succeeded in recruiting more than 250 new members of staff with more than 400 more new jobs planned for this year as well. Due to Corona, more than 90 percent of the employees have been working from home and they want to continue working along these lines after Corona, as revealed in the latest staff survey.

Last year, in the Digital Transformation division, Materna served the increased demand for the topics of application modernization and containerization, DevOps and managed services. Materna scores highly with a comprehensive range of consulting services and solutions for IT service management, for the agile introduction of new services and applications as well as application architectures. Furthermore, there is a continuing trend for transferring IT-budgets to specialist user departments in companies. Materna supports these departments with the implementation of their digital, data-driven business models. In such cases Materna convinces its customers with the topics of IoT based services, data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) and has been able to position itself even more strongly than ever for customers in the manufacturing and automotive sectors.

The business with customers in public administration developed very pleasingly last year. Multiple new customer projects and framework contracts were gained on both federal and state levels which all contributed to the growth trajectory. One important impetus for public administration is the Online Access Act (OZG), which, with its deadline set for the end of 2022, is a significant driver behind digitalization in public bodies. "With our range of services, we want to take on the role of a pioneer for digitalization in the public sector and help to pave the way for digitalized and lean administration in Germany”, says Martin Wibbe. When it comes to establishing the new Digital Ministry, which is currently being planned, and the reorientation of the Federal IT services provider, Materna would also like to play a significant role. Further focuses for the public sector by Materna include the topics of cloud, cyber security, e-health, GAIA-X and artificial intelligence.

Materna’s business with SAP consulting services is carried out via their 100 percent subsidiary cbs (Corporate Business Solutions Unternehmensberatung GmbH). This consultancy implements digital business processes and global SAP solutions, mainly addressing customers in the manufacturing and automotive industry, in 2020 achieving a growth of around 13 percent compared to the previous year. cbs employs around 700 staff and, in addition to their headquarters in Heidelberg, is present at 20 locations worldwide.

For Materna IPS GmbH, their subsidiary specialised in the aviation sector, 2020 was not an easy year. However, they were still able to increase their turnover and several important customer projects were implemented successfully, such as for Tokyo’s Haneda airport in Japan and at the new Berlin-Brandenburg airport. Materna IPS delivers software and hardware for automated passenger and baggage handling at more than 100 airports around the world. Every day, more than 300,000 check-ins are carried out using the self-service kiosks from Materna IPS.

About Materna

The Materna group currently employs more than 2,600 people worldwide and achieved sales of 355.1 million euros in 2020. Materna covers the entire range of services of a full-service provider in the premium segment: from consulting to implementation to operation. The focus areas are digital management, enterprise service management, passenger journey, SAP transformation, Journey2Cloud™, cyber security, digital experience, sustainability & resilience and data economy. Customers are IT organizations as well as specialist departments in companies and public administration.