GEA postpones its Annual General Meeting, dividend remains unchanged

Owing to the COVID-19 virus, the technology company GEA is postponing its Annual General Meeting originally planned for April 30, 2020, in Düsseldorf and will reschedule it for the end of the year. The health of the company’s shareholders, employees and the service providers involved takes the highest priority. By postponing the event, GEA is making an active contribution to slowing the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

This year as well, GEA wants to offer its shareholders an opportunity to exercise their rights to the full extent. In conjunction with the COVID-19 crisis in particular, an especially high number of questions is to be expected. For this reason, the company has decided after an intensive review of all its options to postpone the Annual General Meeting and not to hold a virtual event. For this purpose GEA will make use of the deadline extension recently resolved by the legislator, and thus also follow the recommendation of several shareholder representatives. Since it is currently not possible to foresee when a reliable legal foundation for holding physical events will again exist, GEA has chosen a point in time at the end of 2020. The precise date of the Annual General Meeting will be published later.

The company is upholding the proposal on the appropriation of profits formulated in its 2019 Annual Report, and thus still plans to pay a dividend for fiscal year 2019 of a total of EUR 0.85 per share. In advance, GEA will make the maximum possible advance payment of EUR 0.42 per share permitted by law based on the last two annual financial statements. This advance payment is set for May 6, 2020, when payment of the dividend was originally planned. This was decided by the Executive Board and the Supervisory Board.