Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,
Management Board
In 2021, the ALTANA Group achieved its strongest sales growth of the past ten years
despite considerable turbulence in the market environment, thus emphatically continuing
on its profitable growth course. At the same time, we succeeded in setting new standards
in innovation, sustainability, and digitalization.
In several respects, 2021 was a year in which the people at ALTANA and the company as
a whole faced substantial challenges.
First and foremost, we succeeded in protecting the health and safety of all our employees
worldwide. Together, we managed to prevent the coronavirus from spreading significantly
at our sites. While many colleagues continued to work mainly from home in 2021
for the protection of all, the teams in the laboratories, production, and logistics in particular
ensured that on-site operations could go on. Almost all of our worldwide sites ran
at full capacity to cope with the high demand. In the year under review, occupational
safety was particularly important due to the high workload. But even in this situation, we
succeeded in maintaining a low level of occupational accidents at our sites. As a result,
we achieved our ambitious safety targets once again.
The fact that we remained the reliable partner in 2021 that our customers have valued
for decades, especially in times of high uncertainty, was not a matter of course. The
upswing that had begun at the end of 2020 picked up considerably in the course of the
first quarter. At the same time, raw material and logistics bottlenecks came to a head
worldwide, leading to enormous price increases that we had to counter. Overall, in 2021
we not only achieved historically high capacity utilization and record sales in almost all
areas, but also ensured that our profitability remained within the long-term target range
despite a sharp rise in material costs.
Notwithstanding the record output in production, we achieved important milestones on
our way to climate neutrality by 2025, in line with the UN Global Compact initiative