Shaping the future through continual self-renewal
The ability to act quickly and resolutely is one of Evonik’s outstanding strengths. The past has
taught us the need to keep reinventing our company, however favorable or unfavorable the
conditions. So much so that we have made ongoing self-renewal a business principle. In applying
this principle, we follow the logic of product and operating business life cycles, laying the
foundations for sustained profitable growth. Ongoing self-renewal means that we subject our
business models, organization and strategies to a process of constant review and improvement.
No such thing as an old product
For Evonik, self-renewal starts in the product portfolio, by critically appraising and improving
products and pinpointing new applications. One Evonik success story that illustrates this process
particularly well is PLEXIGLAS® (in North and South America: ACRILYTE®). This classic product has
been on the market since 1930, and we have continually developed new applications and
functionalities for it over the years. For example, noise barriers made from PLEXIGLAS® are
installed along expressways, highways and high-speed rail lines in over 30 countries around the
world. Now a new advancement, PLEXIGLAS SOUNDSTOP® GS CC, is attracting widespread interest. This
has an extra built-in safety feature that opens the door to using PLEXIGLAS® as a strong but
lightweight wind barrier on bridges and overpasses: polyamide filaments inside the material hold
broken sheets together in the event of a vehicle impact and prevent falling fragments. The most
spectacular deployment for this new-generation PLEXIGLAS® so far is on the world’s highest
cable-stayed bridge, the Viaduc de Millau over the Tarn valley in the South of France.
Ongoing self-renewal at Evonik also means rigorously aligning the company’s organizational
structure to market needs. A case in point is the ‘industry teams’ we have created to serve
specific industries with the combined expertise of specialists from a number of different business
units. The Paints & Coatings team, for example, brings together our entire knowledge on paints
and coatings from several units. This team has conceived a special approach, Smart Formulating,
which spans the entire development chain from requirement specifications to custom-tailored
solutions and product delivery. This helps us analyze current and future market trends and develop
new formulations and materials in close cooperation with customers. Other industry teams mobilize
our accumulated expertise for the automotive, plastics and pharmaceutical industries.
