US-based appliance juggernaut Whirlpool Corporation saw a considerable decrease in sales and earnings across 2024, leading to an overall loss of more than $320m across the year.
Whirlpool closed the 2024 year with sales of $16.6bn (roughly £13.3bn), which is a steep decline of almost 15% from last year’s sales of $19.4bn.
Pre-tax earnings for 2024 amounted to $887m (around £714m). This is another sharp drop of over 25% over last year’s earnings, which totalled around $1.2bn at the close of 2023.
Looking at the company’s reported net earnings after tax, it ended up making a loss of $323m (£260m) across the year. This marks a considerable decline from this time 12 months ago, when Whirlpool Corporation posted earnings of $481m for 2023.
In fact, these latest results are consistent with the corporation’s financial sales trajectory over the last several years. The sales decline of around 15% follows Whirlpool’s end of year 2023 results being 1.4% lower than 2022, which in turn, were 11% down from its record breaking sales figures in 2021.
Whirlpool Corporation clarified that Q2, Q3 and Q4 reporting in these 2024 financial results specifically exclude its previously-owned European business, which merged with European appliance brand Arçelik to form Beko Europe early last year.
Looking at the last quarter of 2024 specifically, Whirlpool Corporation’s net sales figure of $4.1bn were down by almost 19% from the same period in 2023, and pre-tax profits were similarly down by 6.8%.
Breaking down the sales figures by region, major domestic appliance (MDA) sales were down by 1.4% in North America, and 4% in Latin America. However, on a more positive note, MDA net sales were up by 7.6% in Asia.
Looking ahead to the end of 2025, Whirlpool Corporation said it is anticipating seeing full-year net sales of approximately $15.8bn.
Marc Bitzer, Whirlpool Corporation’s chairman and CEO, concluded: “In 2024, we continued to make progress in our operations and delivered on our cost take out commitment of $300 million while achieving the closure of the Europe transaction, supporting our ongoing portfolio transformation.”
“In 2025, we expect to deliver more than $200 million of cost take out and position our business for the eventual U.S. housing recovery.”
