64 Innovation, Employees, Environment, and Safety
Innovation, Employees, Environment,
and Safety
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
current requirements regarding performance profile, costs,
environmental protection, and sustainability. Thanks to close
cooperation with our customers, we are able to identify
global technology trends at an early stage and to be immediately
involved in new development fields. This enables
us to develop tailored solutions quickly and reliably. We build
on existing competencies, on the one hand, and gain ac-
cess to new ones on the other, in order to continuously adapt
our product portfolio to market and customer needs. There
is also great potential to combine our competencies across the
divisions to establish innovative solutions on the market
more quickly and efficiently. To this end, our researchers and
developers have access to the latest analytical methods
in our chemical laboratories and application-technology test
laboratories. Numerous awards from our customers underscore
our success as an innovative solutions provider.
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. The basis for these
innovations are the strong competencies of the divisions
along the entire value chain as well as the synergies that
arise between the divisions. For the design of new innovation
areas, we use three different but thematically complementary
approaches: the ALTANA Institute, our technology platforms,
and corporate venturing.
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. Here we cooperate in the area of basic research on
topics that form the foundation for further more application
oriented internal research and development activities. In
addition to the technology transfers of the first completed
projects to the divisions, this year also saw the establishment
of a new international research cooperation with the University
of Haute-Alsace in France and a collaboration with
Friedrich Schiller University in Jena.
As in 2020, in the 2021 fiscal year ALTANA’s investments
in technology platforms exceeded the previous year’s figures.
This once again demonstrates the progressive expansion
of investments based on targeted customer cooperation.
Despite the pandemic-related restrictions both in terms
of customer support and expansion of the customer base,
the Printed Electronics innovation platform, which has been
integrated into ELANTAS, succeeded in generating initial
sales, building up a solid sales pipeline on this basis and acquiring
new business.
A versatile product portfolio for 3D printing was developed
as part of the Cubic Ink technology platform. In
Research and development expenses (in € million )
2017 142.5
2018 154.1
2019 165.6
2020 163.4
2021 179.7