Letter from the Management Board 3
With this step, we are actively shaping our future in an environment that will continue to
offer manifold opportunities, as well as challenges. In the coming years, we anticipate
restrained
worldwide economic growth overall, as well as the possibility to stand out from
this trend as an innovation-driven specialty chemicals company.
With the Keep Changing Agenda, we are creating the prerequisites for accelerating our
growth, especially under our own steam. We want to create sustainable value – for
our customers, employees, our shareholder, and society as a whole. We consistently align
our entire organization accordingly. And we want to advance our capabilities to the
next level. This includes leveraging digitization at ALTANA. In mid-2016, we created the
new Digital Transformation department for this purpose.
The people at ALTANA are the key to our success. They are the ones who effect and
shape changes and experience them as personal enrichment. To tap our potential completely,
however, we need even more diversity and mobility within the ALTANA Group.
Thus, we are paying particular attention to further promoting talent consistently around
the world.
Finally, we want to differentiate ourselves from the competition to an even greater extent
through innovations,
but also increasingly through sustainability, beyond our products
and our customers’ manufacturing processes. Outside of our laboratories, too, we can only
be successful in the long run if we firmly anchor ecological and social aspects
in our
company. This is our understanding of sustainability and we have ourselves measured on
this basis.
The fact that we received the Gold Status in the renowned EcoVadis sustainability rating
shows that we have already achieved a high standard. In 2016, we further improved
all our key accident figures compared to the previous year. Above all, the lost work time
due to accidents was significantly reduced. We also continued to improve our environmental
key figures in the divisions. To the same extent to which we are advancing
economically, we want to steadily optimize our results in the areas of environmental
protection
and safety. Hence, we are setting ourselves increasingly ambitious goals in
these fields, too.