Our vision, which was refined in 2011, and our five strategic goals remain in place. Taken as a whole, they form our strategy’s foundation and express our performance aspirations. The focus of our strategy is profitable growth and securing a leading competitive position in most of our business fields, and our actions are oriented to sustainable development.
We see the paths toward reaching these strategic goals in:
- Increasing our presence in emerging markets and regions and investing in growth markets. Here, our priorities are Asia (especially China, India and South Korea) and South America (primarily Brazil).
- Strengthening our operating business through innovations. Above all, we see potential in substituting existing products with new ones that offer better properties, are more environmentally friendly and create added value for the customer.
- Using operational excellence to optimize our productivity and costs. The “Wacker Operating System” (WOS) program bundles, promotes and processes corporate projects for systematic process improvement.
- Increasing the quality of our products and therefore directly creating value for our customers in their applications.
- Placing the customer even more at the center of our actions through intensive contacts, better service and alliances.
- The contribution made by our employees through their outstanding expertise and their ideas to ensure the success of this strategy.
To help meet our strategic goals, we are focusing on the highly promising fields of energy, urbanization and construction, digitization, and greater prosperity in emerging countries. WACKER offers products that satisfy these global trends.
Megatrends
Strategy of the Individual Divisions
WACKER SILICONES
To grow profitably, WACKER SILICONES defined its strategic priorities more closely in 2012. Various measures are being adopted to achieve this. We are expanding market share with high-end products for use in the areas of health, personal-care, medicine, electronics, automotive engineering and energy. We aim at increasing supply-chain contributions while maintaining current raw-material consumption levels. Strong utilization of our production capacity is an important factor in keeping our specific production costs as low as possible. Differentiated marketing strategies are being developed for selling standard and specialty products. Key growth markets in Asia and South America are central to marketing activities. We want to improve growth by focusing on innovative products and applications.
WACKER POLYMERS
WACKER POLYMERS continues to firmly pursue its strategy of profitable growth in dispersions and dispersible polymer powders. The key is to develop regional production capacities for dispersions and polymer powders so that local and regional customer demand can be met both promptly and cost-effectively. To this end, it is important to develop product solutions that are specifically tailored to local application requirements. An important aspect of this strategy is to encourage the substitution of styrene-butadiene and styrene-acrylate with VAE dispersions and to develop new applications for our products.
WACKER BIOSOLUTIONS
WACKER BIOSOLUTIONS continues to concentrate on the pharmaceutical, agrochemical and food industries. We increasingly draw on chemical-biotech synergies to provide our customers with complete solutions for their specific market needs. The success of our products in the industries we serve is based on a strong customer orientation. Consequently, the division’s organizational structure is firmly oriented to customers and markets. WACKER BIOSOLUTIONS will intensify its focus on innovation as a motor for future revenue growth and, to this end, will increase its R&D expenditures.
WACKER POLYSILICON
WACKER POLYSILICON’s strategic aims are to maintain its quality and cost leadership as a hyperpure-polysilicon manufacturer, and to expand its production capacities in line with market growth. In a competitive environment, the division’s cost position is a key success factor. For this reason, we are reinforcing our focus on reducing costs through productivity improvements and on optimizing our supplier base.
SILTRONIC
Siltronic will concentrate on four coordinated strategic priorities. We are enhancing capacity utilization and cost structure by concentrating on lead sites. In the wafer business, the focus is on 300 mm silicon wafers, where growth is strongest. One ongoing strategic task is to implement productivity, cost-saving and flexibility initiatives to improve production processes and workflows. Investments in product developments are aimed at fulfilling the newest design-rule specifications and putting quality-enhancing measures into place.
In 2012, we also made an important strategic decision. Siltronic will no longer invest in the development of 450 mm silicon wafers.