Lely enjoyed a successful year in 2018, achieving increased growth while also celebrating its 70th anniversary. The company also launched a new Astronaut milking robot, the A5, and a new Juno feed pusher.

Lely CEO Alexander van der Lely explained: “2018 has been a great year for Lely. We were proud to celebrate our 70th birthday and at the same time launch several new exciting products. This enabled us to have strong growth of 9% with a total revenue of €416m, proving that selling our forage activities to AGCO Corporation in 2017, so as to fully focus on robotics and farm management data, was the correct decision to make.”

It is worth noting that this reported turnover for the 2017 year (up 9%) included the forage activities until 1 October, when it was sold to the AGCO.

Lely also started up business in new markets such as Greece, Hungary, Taiwan, Uruguay and Argentina in 2018. A significant contribution to the growth came from European and Asian regions, while the North American market saw some slowing down due to milk price challenges. Lely invested 6% of its annual sales into R&D.

Since first entering the automatic feeding market in 2012, Lely has installed more than 500 Vectors in more than 25 countries worldwide. Lely introduced a new version of the Vector last August.

On-farm dairy processor

Last year Lely unveiled a system to process milk on the farm, called the Lely Orbiter. This automatic processor works 24-7 and has been designed to process milk directly from the milking robots, all the way to the bottle, offering new opportunities for farmers to market their own milk.

Outlook

Lely explained that the outlook for 2019 is promising, with a record high order book. Earlier this year, a new Lely office was opened in Qingdao, China. Today, the Lely Group is active in more than 40 countries and employs around 1,400 people.