Six Words That Hold the Key to Arkema. A major producer of specialty chemicals and advanced materials, Arkema helps tackle key societal challenges such as the need to enhance energy efficiency and create new sources of energy through innovation and sustainability-focused products. A responsible, engaged industrial operator, we also strive continuously to shrink our environmental footprint and keep the lines of communication open with our stakeholders. Our strategy can be summed up in six key words.
Chemicals.
Our plan in the next few years is to cement our global leadership in specialty chemicals, which are high-value-added products that offer strong growth potential and are manufactured close to end markets. Examples include high-performance polymers — also called advanced materials — as well as coating resins and adhesives. We aim to generate over 80% of our revenue from specialty chemical activities in 2023, up from 70% today.
Adhesives.
Our goal in adhesives is to more than double our revenue from 2016 (€1.6 billion). A third of the increase will come from organic growth and two-thirds from targeted acquisitions. We intend to be fully involved in consolidating this attractive but still fragmented market. Adhesives and advanced materials together are expected to comprise nearly 60% of our revenue in 2023, up from 45% in 2018.
Commitment.
We aim to grow Arkema’s business activities sustainably and responsibly and to tackle social and environmental challenges. Our corporate social responsibility (CSR) policy is built on three strong, pivotal commitments: to offer innovation-driven, sustainable solutions; to responsibly manage our industrial activities; and to foster open, local dialogue with our stakeholders (see pages 58 to 65).
Materials.
The highly specific properties of advanced materials (which account for 25% of our revenue) offer fantastic opportunities to innovate in developing lightweight transportation materials, bio-based polymers, new energies and electronics. We are expanding capacity for such products, including a new Sartomer plant for UV photocure resins in China, the start-up of a new Kepstan® PEKK production plant in the United States, and new specialty polyamide facilities in Asia and France. They support our goal to grow our advanced materials volumes by around 5% by 2023.
Innovation.
We compiled a list of issues facing society to make sure that our portfolio of solutions addresses our customers’ specific needs, to better target our R&D efforts. This regularly updated exercise prompted us to define six innovation platforms that dovetail with six of the United Nations’ sustainable development goals. These platforms cover bio-based products, materials and design, new energies, water management, electronics solutions, and home efficiency and insulation.
R&D.
Our growth is driven by indisputable R&D expertise, enabling us to roll out innovative new products each year, support our customers technically and improve the performance of our processes.
Our R&D expertise is built on the work of our 1,600 researchers at 15 centers worldwide. We can also count on a sizable portfolio of more than 9,000 patents that is growing yearly, as evidenced by the 244 new applications we filed in 2018.
