Structure of Shareholders

Shareholder structure 2023

On November 21, 2023, GEA retired 8,161,096 treasury shares that had been repurchased as part of the share buyback program between August 2021 and the end of 2022, with a total volume of around EUR 300 million. On December 31, 2023, the number of shares with voting rights is now 172,331,076. On November 7, 2023, GEA announced that the company would be purchasing additional shares on the stock exchange for an amount of up to EUR 400 million (excluding transaction costs) in the period between November 2023 and the beginning of 2025, based on the authorization granted by the Annual General Meeting on April 27, 2023. As part of the share buyback program commenced on November 9, 2023, a total of 1,451,583 outstanding shares were repurchased by December 2023 at an average price of EUR 34.26 and are now held as treasury shares (equivalent to around 0.8 percent of all shares). The shares acquired under the new buyback program are also due to be retired at the end of the program without reducing the share capital. The market capitalization of GEA Group Aktiengesellschaft at the end of 2023 amounted to EUR 6.5 billion (previous year: EUR 6.9 billion).

GEA continued to analyze its shareholder structure on a regular basis in fiscal year 2023. The most recent analysis was performed in December 2023 and identified 94.5 percent of all 172.3 million shares. According to the analysis, institutional investors held 76.8 percent of all shares. Major shareholders accounted for 
8.8 percent and retail investors for 8.1 percent of the shares. 0.8 percent were held as treasury shares at the time of the analysis. 

On November 21, 2023, major shareholder Oliver Capital (the principal shareholder of Groupe Bruxelles Lambert) announced that it had sold 11.25 million GEA Group AG shares. The background to this is GBL's previously communicated strategy of no longer wanting to hold minority interests in companies, but to concentrate on majority shareholdings. As a result, Oliver Capital is no longer considered a major shareholder of GEA as defined by Deutsche Börse AG. GEA now only has one investor – Kuwait Investment Office (KIA) – that is deemed to be a major shareholder according to such definition. Based on the latest information available to the company, KIA holds a stake of 8.8 percent (approximately 15.2 million shares). Neither this stake nor the 0.8 percent held as treasury shares count as free float. According to Deutsche Börse AG, GEA’s free float was 90.4 percent as of December 31,2023.