Letter from the Management Board 3
actively supports the goals of this organization, the world’s most important and largest
initiative for responsible corporate management.
By integrating sustainability criteria into our business processes, we took a great stride
forward last year. And nearly all of our environmental key performance indicators showed
a positive development. In 2017, we already reached our goal of reducing our specific
CO² emissions by 30 percent in the period from 2007 to 2020. After improving all of our
key accident figures in 2016, we did not achieve the goals we set ourselves for the past
fiscal year. As a result, we are now focusing even more on measures that will enable fur-
ther optimization in this important area, too.
Throughout all of this, our ability to change is the engine of our further development.
Within the framework of our Keep Changing Agenda, established in 2016, we made sig-
nificant progress in 2017: We strengthened the strategic management function of
ALTANA’s holding company and bundled competence and service units, which began
work at the beginning of the year as the ALTANA Management Services company. And
we also pushed forward the digital transformation of ALTANA, to cite just a few examples.
As in the development of our Keep Changing Agenda, we rely on the integration of our
employees in corporate decision-making processes. Furthermore, we are in contact
with external interest groups and opinion leaders. We are convinced that only in dialog
with people who are associated with ALTANA directly or indirectly can we keep the
company on track for the future and create value not only for our customers, employees,
and shareholder, but also for society as a whole.
For this reason, in 2017 we intensified our dialog with selected representatives of these
stakeholders by means of structured interviews. You can read excerpts in the magazine
section of this report. For example, a mayor and a managing director at ACTEGA talk
about what constitutes the right degree of citizen participation in expansion projects in the
middle of residential areas. An internationally experienced energy expert, who other-
wise advises governments, exchanges ideas with the chief engineer of our most energy-
intensive operation. The chairwoman of a children’s welfare organization in India talks
with our CSR manager in that country about the importance of legally required social