Metso’s Board of Directors has decided on Metso’s new long-term financial targets in relation to Metso’s new strategy.

Mr Matti Kähkönen CEO and president of Metso said that “Our target is to create shareholder value through growth and profitability and we will focus on growth in businesses in which we can achieve a strong global position. High share of services is important for our value creation and thus we target high growth in services in all of our businesses.”

He continues that “Profitability will be measured by earnings per share on the group level and by EBITA margins on the segment level. By introducing segment-level profitability targets we aim to increase transparency of Metso’s businesses. We think that growth in sales and earnings together with high return on capital employed are the main drivers of our shareholder value going forward. Our record-high order backlog and strong balance sheet provide us with a solid backbone to support the growth.”

The following new financial targets replace the previous targets set in August 2008:

Growth
Our target for sales growth is unchanged and we target annual average sales growth over 10% including acquisitions. We will continue to emphasize growth in the Services business where the target is to reach more than 10% growth annually.

Profitability
Metso will introduce a new group-level profitability target of the annual earnings per share growth exceeding the sales growth.

Capital efficiency
Return on capital employed (ROCE-%) is one of the key measurements used in Metso and we target a return higher than 20 percent (excl. impact of major acquisitions).

Capital structure
Our target is to maintain a solid investment grade rating. This target is unchanged. The target for dividend policy remains unchanged as well. Metso’s target is to distribute at least 50 percent of annual earnings per share as a dividend or in other forms of capital distribution.