Management Structures

Wacker Chemie AG’s four-member Executive Board oversees the Group’s strategies, resources, infrastructure and organizational structure. Dr. Rudolf Staudigl is the Board’s President and CEO. Other members are Dr. Christian Hartel, Dr. Tobias Ohler and Auguste Willems.

An Executive Board Meeting is WACKER’s highest decision-making authority. Below the Executive Board, there are various committees whose membership spans several organizational sectors and legal entities. These committees ensure that corporate strategies are implemented groupwide.

The Corporate Leadership Team (CLT) discusses strategically important topics, analyzes possible trends affecting markets and our competitors, and discusses key topics not directly connected with day-to-day business. The CLT comprises the entire Executive Board, business-division presidents and corporate-department heads.

The main committees for environment, health, safety and product safety are the annual Corporate Environment, Health and Safety (EHS) Meetings and EHS Strategy Meetings, led by the Executive Board member responsible for EHS & PS. Personnel policies are dealt with monthly in the HR Strategy Meeting while employee health is addressed once a year by the Health Promotion Steering Committee – both are chaired by WACKER’s personnel director.

The Raw Material Conference and the WOS Conference focus on the Group’s productivity projects and goals and are led by the Executive Board member responsible for Corporate Engineering. The Group Innovation Meeting and the R&D Projects Conference cover innovation strategies and projects.

Environmental, health and safety officers meet for an international EHS & PS Conference once a year. They exchange experiences and discuss the progress made regarding sustainability topics of groupwide significance. EHS & PS management focused on the Americas in 2018 and on Asia in 2017. Related activities involved an increasing number of on-site inspections at our various plants.

The Corporate Sustainability department oversees the implementation of WACKER’s voluntary commitments under Responsible Care^® and the Global Compact and coordinates our sustainability activities worldwide.

in 2018, WACKER founded a Human Rights Committee whose members are experts from the Corporate Sustainability, Compliance, Legal Affairs, Human Resources, Procurement & Logistics and Sales departments or are human rights specialists. This committee is tasked with prioritizing potential impacts on human rights at WACKER and throughout the supply chain. It is also responsible for checking existing management approaches in terms of mechanisms that fulfill a protective and monitoring function, as well as for identifying weak points and meeting the need for information.

WACKER Sustainable Solutions

Launched in 2018, our WACKER Sustainable Solutions program puts our goal of focusing on sustainability into effect. This program is intended to anchor sustainability-related aspects more firmly in our business models, to identify new, sustainable business opportunities and to minimize sustainability-related risks at an early stage.

WACKER Sustainable Solutions aims to:

• Promote and expand our existing sustainable business fields
• Set up new sustainable business
• Identify and assess sustainability-related risks to our business portfolio at an early stage

During the reporting period, the Executive Board held a Sustainability Council to deal with monitoring and coordinating the WACKER Sustainable Solutions Program. This council is attended by members of the business divisions and corporate departments, who rate the company’s sustainability performance. The Sustainability Council coordinates interdepartmental measures and reviews the progress made by the program.

Topics Highlighted by Sustainability Management

The regional focus of sustainability management in 2018 was the Americas. Our sites at Charleston, Adrian, Eddyville and Calvert City underwent health and safety audits. Sustainability management focused on Asia in 2017. The Chinese sites in Nanjing, Shanghai and Zhangjiagang, as well as the Kolkata site in India, underwent occupational health and safety inspections.