Our vision and five overarching strategic goals remain in place. Our strategy is focused on profitable growth and the goal of attaining a leading competitive position in most of our business fields, while observing the principle of sustainable development. Our five overarching goals are:

• WACKER products and solutions are our customers’ first choice.
• We want to be one of the world’s best employers.
• We tap new markets via product and process innovations for tomorrow’s world.
• We continuously increase our company’s value.
• Our responsibility as a company extends beyond our business activities.

As part of Capital Market Day in October 2016, we presented our strategy for the WACKER Group until 2020. Three levers determine our strategy: expansion into emerging markets and regions; innovations; and the substitution of competitors’ products with WACKER products. Our strategic goals for the next five years are:

• Expanding our production capacities, with capital expenditures below depreciation.
• Growing faster than the chemical-industry average.
• Focusing even more strongly on sustainability.
• Achieving attractive margins throughout the economic cycle.
• Increasing our cash inflow from operating activities.

Our investments will be below depreciation until 2020. In the individual regions, we are focusing our spending on plants for producing intermediates and downstream products that have a lower capital intensity than full-scale plants for upstream products.

With these new capacities, we intend to grow more strongly than the chemical-industry average. Momentum will be spurred by product innovations and by raising the percentage of specialty products in our portfolio. Our focal regions and countries for further growth remain unchanged: Brazil, China, India, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. We also see opportunities for our chemical business to expand in our established markets in Europe and the USA.

We are continually striving to reduce our raw-material consumption and improve the process efficiency of our plants. In addition, we are developing a lot of sustainable products for renewable energy, thermal insulation and electromobility. The purpose of these products is to lower CO₂ emissions.

Our aim is to achieve attractive margins with our products. With chemicals, our target EBITDA margin is >16 percent, while for our polysilicon business it is >30 percent.

Our significantly lower capital expenditures, our continuing efficiency and cost improvements, and our planned sales growth will all lift cash flow. We want our shareholders to benefit even more from our profitability. Our goal is to distribute around half of our net income to stockholders. Previously, WACKER aimed for a distribution ratio of at least 25 percent of net income.