66 Innovation and Employees
Innovation and Employees
Innovation
As a specialty chemicals company, innovations are an important
factor for ALTANA, enabling us to offer our customers
new, competitive solutions and at the same time to meet
cutting-edge requirements regarding performance profile,
costs, environmental protection, and sustainability. Thanks to
close cooperation with our customers we are integrated
into new fields of development at an early stage and thus
can develop customized solutions quickly and reliably. We
build on existing competencies, on the one hand, and gain
access to new ones on the other, in order to continuously
adapt our product portfolio to market and customer needs.
State-of-the-art analytics in chemical labs as well as appli-
cation technology testing laboratories geared to specific features
are available to our researchers and developers for
targeted development.
In addition to the activities in the business divisions,
selected innovations are initiated and coordinated at the
ALTANA level, aimed at tapping new business fields and
absorbing technology and market trends. This is achieved
through different procedures, namely, through the ALTANA
Institute, the central management of technology platforms,
as well as corporate venturing investments.
With the help of the ALTANA Institute, external networks
and close cooperation with universities and research institutes
around the world are used to harness outside impetus.
This year, the first projects were successfully completed
after a three-year period and a technology transfer to the
respective business areas began.
In the 2019 fiscal year, ALTANA again invested an above-
average amount in technology platforms and thus accel-
erated research activities that had been initiated in previous
years. The Printed Electronics platform reached an impor-
tant milestone. After years of intensive research and development,
it was integrated into the organization of our
ELANTAS business unit to be able to optimally utilize synergies
in sales as well as market penetration. In 2019, ALTANA
also made considerable progress in the field of 3D printing
for additive production. ALTANA and the printer manufac-
turer dp polar, in which the company has had a stake since
2017, presented the world’s first 3D printing system with
a continuously rotating print platform at the leading international
trade fair for additive manufacturing Formnext.
The printing inks specially developed by ALTANA for this purpose
enable the components to be produced according to
customer-specific requirements with high precision and productivity
in areas such as the automotive, aerospace, and
medical technology sectors. The laser transfer technology
Heliosonic, which has also been set up as a technology
platform, can open up further market segments in collabo-
ration with dp polar in the medium term. In 2019, the
Heliosonic platform succeeded in putting the first prototype
into operation. As a result, the future direction of the sys-
tem can be shaped in discussions with customers.
Research and development expenses (in € million )
2015 128.1
2016 129.3
2017 142.5
2018 154.1
2019 165.6