# Europe's Energy Crisis Is Bad for Industry. One German Company Is Betting It's Good for Business. > Rising energy costs across Europe are squeezing food, drink, and pharma manufacturers. GEA Group's answer isn't sympathy, it's equipment: engineering built to cut a customer's energy bill in half, and a CEO who thinks that's the whole pitch. - Source: Continental - Canonical URL: https://continental.today/article/gea-group-europe-energy-crisis-opportunity - Author: staff - Section: Business - Published: 2026-09-16T11:21:13.076Z - Updated: 2026-09-16T11:21:13.076Z - Tags: GEA Group, Energy Crisis, Europe --- Energy costs have been climbing across Europe, a squeeze made worse by the fallout from the Iran-U.S. conflict and a string of policy decisions that have left the continent, Germany especially, working with depleted reserves. For most industrial companies, that's simply a cost problem to absorb. For GEA Group, a German engineering company that builds machinery for food, drink, and pharmaceutical production, it has become a sales pitch. GEA's technology sits inside dairy plants, drying operations, fermentation lines, freezing systems, and packaging facilities, exactly the kind of energy-intensive industrial operations that rising power costs hit hardest. "A lot of companies are struggling with high energy costs," CEO Stefan Klebert has said, and those companies are increasingly willing to pay for equipment that cuts consumption meaningfully rather than at the margins. That shift shows up directly in how Klebert has redirected his engineers. Rather than chase incremental efficiency gains, he has pushed the company toward what he calls step-change reductions. "Don't innovate to find 15 percent more output," he has said. "Same thing with 30 to 40 percent less energy." The clearest example so far is a project built for Arla, the Danish organic dairy producer: an industrial heat pump paired with a milk spray dryer that cut the plant's total energy consumption by more than half without reducing how much it produces. The strategy is showing up in the numbers. In the first half of 2026, GEA reported revenue of €2.7 billion, or about $3.1 billion, up 5.7 percent year over year, with EBITDA before restructuring costs rising 10 percent to €456.5 million, roughly $526.7 million, an EBITDA margin of 16.8 percent. The company has also been putting money behind adjacent bets, including an €8 million investment, about $9.2 million, for a roughly 5.5 percent stake in Solar Foods, a Finnish company developing Solein, a protein powder grown without traditional agriculture. GEA has committed €175 million, close to $202 million, to decarbonizing its own factories as part of a target to reach net-zero emissions across its value chain by 2040. That commitment stands out against a broader retreat elsewhere in European industry. A survey by consultancy Horvath found two in five European chief sustainability officers are reassessing their climate ambitions under financial pressure, and a separate EY survey found 57 percent of European businesses would scale back sustainability initiatives if they needed to cut costs. GEA's bet is that it doesn't need to sell efficiency as a climate commitment at all, just as a way to shrink a bill that keeps getting bigger. --- Originally published by Continental. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://continental.today/article/gea-group-europe-energy-crisis-opportunity.