WACKER BIOSOLUTIONS

Strategy

Over the past few years, WACKER BIOSOLUTIONS has strengthened its activities, consolidated its product offering, and intensified its focus on the pharmaceutical, agrochemical and food industries. Drawing increasingly on chemical-biotech synergies, we provide our customers with complete solutions for their special market needs. Our strategy targets biotechnology as a highly promising, dynamic growth segment. We intend to benefit from this anticipated growth, especially in pharmaceutical proteins (biologics), agrochemicals, food ingredients and food supplements. In our target industries, being highly customer oriented is a decisive product-success factor. Consequently, we realigned the division’s organizational structure in early 2010, greatly strengthening our customer and market focus.

Sales and EBITDA Climb

WACKER BIOSOLUTIONS benefited from strong demand across all product segments and from the first-time, complete recognition of its gumbase business over an entire year. As a result, sales rose 36 percent to €142.4 million (2009: €104.9 million). In 2009, sales had included gumbase for the last six months only. Compared to 2009, growth was very strong in the division’s main sales-generating businesses, such as gumbase, cysteine, cyclodextrins and biologics.

EBITDA grew faster than sales, soaring 152 percent to €25.0 million (2009: €9.9 million). Like sales, EBITDA was influenced by the first-time, full consolidation of gumbase over the whole year. The EBITDA margin improved to 17.6 percent (2009: 9.4 percent).

Investments Lower than Prior Year

Investments decreased to €6.5 million (2009: €12.7 million). Most funds went into completing a new biologics facility at Jena (Germany), which was inaugurated in March 2010. Thanks to our proprietary ESETEC^® and DENSETEC^® technologies, we can produce biologics more simply, cheaply and in higher yields than is possible with conventional methods. The new Jena facility, together with a process-development and quality-control building completed there in 2009, brings WACKER’s total investment in Jena’s expansion to about €18 million.

Employee numbers at WACKER BIOSOLUTIONS increased to 363 as per December 31, 2010 (December 31, 2009: 344).