Group Management Report Products Safety Environment Human Resources Social Commitment Consolidated Financial Statements 75
profitable growth in the long term. Should ALTANA manage
to enhance its innovativeness more quickly than expected
or to increase its share of new products for which there is a
high demand beyond the target level, there would be even
better prospects for growth. The same applies if we entered
new markets or opened up new application fields for our
products.
Company Acquisitions and Portfolio Measures
Acquisitions play a key role in ALTANA’s long-term value creation.
In recent years, we have continually advanced the
Group strategically due to acquisitions. At the same time, we
cleansed our portfolio of those activities that were not in
line with our strategic aims and for which there were no long-
term value-creation perspectives within the Group.
In the future, we intend to continue to boost our growth
by acquiring companies and activities. This is an essential
prerequisite for us to achieve our strategic growth targets.
Should opportunities arise in the future that exceed our
expectations, these new activities could help us strengthen
our market positions and open up new market segments.
This, in turn, could help us achieve our strategic targets more
quickly.
Synergies
The ALTANA Group is decentralized to a large extent. Still, in
some areas of the value-creation chain and in certain management
functions, central units support the divisions and
play a coordinating role. To the extent that we manage to
push forward the networks within the Group more strongly
than expected, this may spawn further potential to im-
prove efficiency.
The Management Board’s Overall Statement
on the Anticipated Development of the
Group Including Its Overall View of the Risk
and Opportunity Situation
In 2017, we expect the global economy to exhibit slightly stronger
growth than in the previous year. In this environment, we ex-
pect ALTANA to achieve operating sales growth of 2 % to 5 %
with slightly lower earnings profitability. We anticipate the ac-
quisitions agreed upon to contribute to further sales growth; how-
ever, they will also temporarily weaken the value management
key figures.
We believe that the risk of burdens from a muted or even reces-
sive development of the global economy or in important core
regions continues to be palpable. In addition, considerable risks
to our short-term sales and earnings performance are posed
by the higher price volatility on the raw materials markets and by
short-term exchange-rate fluctuations.
Overall, we have not found any risks that could endanger the con-
tinued existence of the company. The risks we face are set
against numerous opportunities that could enable us to achieve
sales and earnings performance surpassing our forecasts.
In sum, we expect to be able to successfully implement our strategy
to sustain profitable growth in the coming years as well.