Mannheim, 13 July 2021 – At today's Annual General Meeting of CropEnergies AG, Mannheim, the shareholders approved by a large majority the proposal of the supervisory board and executive board to increase the dividend to EUR 0.35 (previous year: EUR 0.30) per share entitled to dividend. This results in a total dividend payout of EUR 30.5 million. All other agenda items were also approved with a majority of over 89 percent.
Due to the pandemic, the Annual General Meeting was again held in virtual form. A total of more than 160 shareholders and guests watched the webcast held in the Rosengarten in Mannheim. This means that 84 percent of the share capital was represented.
In advance of the Annual General Meeting, over 70 questions had been submitted, which the executive board members and the chairman of the supervisory board answered entirely and grouped by topic. In addition to the past financial year and the effects of the corona pandemic, the shareholders were particularly interested in the new corporate strategy and the development in the current financial year. CropEnergies had presented the results for the 1st quarter 2021/22 on 07 July 2021. Revenues and earnings had increased significantly compared to the previous year.
Dr. Stephan Meeder, CEO, presented the strategic development and the future plans of CropEnergies Group in detail. Among other things, he presented a cooperation with the French-German Institute for Environmental Technology at the University of Applied Sciences in Saarbrücken. CropEnergies has commissioned the Institute to conduct a feasibility study to see if the BEST-procedure developed by Prof. Dr. Matthias Brunner can be scaled up to industrial scale. BEST stands for BioEnergySTorage. In this biotechnological process, microorganisms convert CO2 very efficiently into methane using hydrogen that was generated from renewable energy. This can be produced in natural gas quality, i.e. as synthetic natural gas it can replace fossil natural gas 1:1 and can therefore be used directly on site or fed into the existing grid. If the feasibility study comes to a positive conclusion, the next step will be to examine the integration of such a process in one of the existing biorefineries of CropEnergies Group.