2008

With sales exceeding €3.2 billion and pre-tax earnings totaling €248 million, the Claas Group presented its best results to date in fiscal year 2007/2008. Sales grew by a total of 21.7%. For the agricultural engineering market alone, the figure was 22.8%. This documents the strong growth in sales in Claas’s core business, agricultural technology, where the company specializes in combine harvesters, foragers, tractors, and green harvest machinery.

The CLAAS Foundation presented its scholarships for 2008, and new for this year students showing great promise in agriculture also received awards for their outstanding performances.

At a large ceremony, CLAAS India Limited, subsidiary of the globally operating CLAAS Group, presented its new combine harvester factory in Chandigarh, Punjab, to Indian agricultural-technology dealers.

CLAAS is extending its JAGUAR 900 forage harvester series still further to include two new JAGUAR 940 and 930 models to complete this high-performance series. The series now covers a wide range of power outputs from 412 to 830 HP (ECE R 24).

Under the watchful eye of an invited Guinness Book of Records official, the LEXION 580 harvested 532 tons of wheat in eight hours. That’s 18 percent better than the previous world record.

The AXOS from CLAAS is a new range of tractors providing from 70 to 100 hp  machines with a choice of specfications, modelled to satisfy all variety of tasks required on farm. Presented to the international trade press in the Czech Republic, the AXOS is a tractor for any occasion. In addition CLAAS has launched an innovation campaign in forage harvesting technology.

With the take-over of the remaining 20% share, the family owned company CLAAS has now become the full owner of Renault Agriculture SAS. In this context, the French subsidiary Renault Agriculture which, as a business unit within the CLAAS group, is responsible for the development and production of tractors, will be renamed “CLAAS Tractor“.

At a recent anniversary event, Shareholder Cathrina Claas and Jan-Hendrik Mohr, Member of the CLAAS Group Executive Board and responsible for grain harvest, announced that production capacity is to be doubled in the next three years.