IN Brief:
- GEA's second-quarter order intake rose 14.2% to €1.495bn as revenue increased 10%.
- Dairy farming, dairy processing, and food were among the strongest customer industries during the quarter.
- The order backlog reached €3.54bn as the equipment group raised its full-year outlook.
Food and dairy investment helped GEA deliver double-digit growth in second-quarter orders and revenue, extending an equipment backlog that reached €3.54bn by the end of June.
Order intake increased 14.2% year on year to €1.495bn during the quarter and grew 15.4% organically. Revenue rose 10% to €1.443bn, with organic growth of 11%, while all four operating divisions contributed to the increase.
Dairy farming, dairy processing, and food were among the strongest customer industries. The performance gives a useful indication of continued capital spending in areas where processors are investing in capacity, hygiene, efficiency, automation, and replacement equipment despite an uneven wider industrial economy.
GEA’s service business also expanded, with second-quarter service revenue rising 8.5% to €570.6m. Services represented 39.6% of group revenue, although the faster increase in new-machine sales reduced the service share slightly compared with the previous year.
EBITDA before restructuring expenses increased 15.6% to €250.6m, lifting the margin from 16.5% to 17.4%. Free cash flow reached €151.1m compared with €38m a year earlier, while the group moved from net debt of €59.8m at the end of June 2025 to net liquidity of €70.9m.
The half-year figures show that the order improvement was broader than a single strong quarter. GEA secured €2.949bn of orders during the first six months of 2026, up 8.3%, while revenue increased 5.7% to €2.716bn.
Dairy processing and dairy farming were among the main contributors to customer-side performance over the half year, alongside distribution and storage and marine. Nutrition Plant Engineering also benefited from several large contracts, with five orders worth a combined €107.2m compared with three large orders totalling €82.6m a year earlier.
The pattern is relevant to food manufacturing because large processing projects rarely consist of a single machine. Dairy capacity investments can involve milk reception, separation, heat treatment, homogenisation, evaporation, drying, cleaning-in-place, utilities, automation, filling, and packaging, creating orders across multiple equipment categories.
At the same time, processors are under pressure to extract more value from existing assets. New equipment increasingly has to demonstrate a connection with throughput, labour reduction, yield, energy consumption, cleaning time, product loss, or the flexibility to handle more recipes and formats.
That tends to favour suppliers able to combine individual machines with process engineering, automation, service, and application development. A separator or filler can be specified as a discrete purchase, but larger projects are increasingly evaluated as connected systems where the performance of one stage affects the efficiency of the next.
GEA has been expanding its role in that earlier development phase. In July, the company opened a food biotechnology application centre in Sarstedt, Germany, creating pilot capability around fermentation, cell cultivation, separation, filtration, and hygienic processing.
Facilities of that type can reduce some of the risk between laboratory formulation and industrial deployment. New food and fermentation processes frequently reach a point where the chemistry or biology works, but equipment sizing, cleaning, separation efficiency, heat transfer, and continuous operation remain unresolved.
The current order book suggests conventional dairy and food processing remains a more immediate source of equipment demand than many emerging categories. GEA’s half-year statement noted declines in beverage and New Food order intake, while dairy processing continued to perform strongly.
That divergence is useful. Capital spending in food manufacturing is not moving uniformly towards newer technologies; much of it remains tied to established categories where producers can connect investment directly with volume, efficiency, plant reliability, and product demand.
GEA has raised its 2026 guidance and now expects organic revenue growth of 6% to 8%, an EBITDA margin before restructuring expenses of 17% to 17.4%, and return on capital employed of 36% to 40%.
The €3.54bn backlog gives the group substantial work to convert into revenue over coming periods. Its composition also shows where processors are prepared to keep committing capital: dairy and mainstream food production remain capable of supporting significant machinery orders when the operational case is strong enough.
