BONN (dpa-AFX) - After the first six months, DHL Group is somewhat more confident about the full year. As earnings before interest and taxes (Ebit), the management now expects at least 6.2 billion euros for 2023 instead of six, as the group announced in Bonn on Tuesday morning. The upper end of the operating profit range, however, remains unchanged at seven billion euros.

Investors in the Dax group initially reacted with sales at the start of trading on the stock exchange. The DHL share was at the bottom of the Dax in early trading, down around four percent. A trader spoke of profit-taking and a mixed set of figures. The stock has gained more than 30 percent since the beginning of the year. The logistics group merely ended up exactly where it was expected, analyst Samuel Bland of JPMorgan also wrote in his initial reaction. Most experts were probably already expecting slightly more than the lower end of the increased range for the annual target in terms of operating profit (Ebit).

After a record year in 2022, DHL is currently in a downturn phase. As was the case at the start of the year, only the Supply Chain division was able to post year-on-year growth in the second quarter. Here, DHL offers its customers supply chain logistics, such as warehouse operations and warehousing, or the processing of shipping returns. In this area, the Group is benefiting from high demand for process automation in the face of increasingly complex supply chains. While DHL also earned more here, earnings declined in the other four of the total of five business units.

Group-wide, revenue in the three months to the end of June fell by a good 16 percent to around 20 billion euros. In day-to-day operations, the Group lost 1.7 billion euros (EBIT), more than a quarter less than a year earlier. At 978 million euros, the bottom line was almost a third lower than in the second quarter of the previous year.

Business in the German home market and the freight forwarding business were particularly weak, with operating profit slumping by almost half in both cases. The lucrative business with time-critical shipments saw the smallest drop in earnings by comparison, at minus 18 percent. In parcel delivery outside Germany, day-to-day profits fell by more than a quarter.

However, despite the drop in earnings, CFO Melanie Kreis does not want to forego investments. She is keeping a close eye on costs "in the current challenging environment. Thanks to its strengthened earnings power, however, DHL is in a position to continue investing in future growth.

By 2025, the Group aims to once again generate an operating profit of more than 8 billion euros and thus match the record year of 2022, when it earned 8.4 billion euros. For this year, DHL's management, led by Tobias Meyer, who has been in charge since the spring, continues to base its forecast on three scenarios, depending on whether and how quickly the economy recovers.

Accordingly, the Group aims to reach the upper end of its operating profit range of now at least 6.2 to seven billion euros if the global economy recovers "dynamically across all markets" in the second half of the year compared with the first six months. If the recovery is subdued, the expectation is in the middle of the range. If the worst-case scenario occurs and there is no significant recovery in the global economy, the Executive Board forecasts reaching the lower end of the range./lew/tav/nas