Mumbai – Henkel recently presented its new strategic priorities and financial ambition, which will shape Henkel until 2020 and beyond – summarised as “Henkel 2020+”. Based on its strong foundation, Henkel aims to generate continued profitable growth by focusing on four strategic priorities: Driving growth, accelerating digitalisation, increasing agility, and funding growth.

“We will build our future on a strong foundation, which will enable us to generate sustainable profitable growth in the coming years. At Henkel, we share the common purpose of creating sustainable value – for our customers and consumers, our employees, our shareholders, as well as for our stakeholders and the communities in which we operate. In addition, our values guide all our actions, decisions and behaviour,” said Hans Van Bylen, Chief Executive Officer of Henkel.

“We want to continue Henkel’s successful development in a highly volatile business environment. By 2020 and beyond, Henkel’s ambition is to generate more profitable growth and to become more customer-focused, more innovative, more agile, and fully digitized in our internal processes and customer-facing activities. In addition, we aim to promote sustainability in all our business activities, reinforcing our leading position,” Hans Van Bylen explained.

“In order to achieve this ambition, we will focus on driving growth, accelerating digitalisation across all our businesses and functions, increasing agility in our organization and teams, and funding our growth through targeted initiatives. In addition to organic growth, acquisitions will continue to be an integral part of our strategy in order to further strengthen our portfolio. We will begin to implement our strategic priorities in a highly energized way from day one, to continue our successful development and create sustainable value,” said Hans Van Bylen, summarizing Henkel’s future strategic direction.

In a highly volatile and uncertain market environment, Henkel has defined a concrete financial ambition for the period until 2020: Over the next four years, Henkel aims to achieve an average organic sales growth between 2% and 4% with an over-proportionate contribution from emerging markets. For adjusted earnings per preferred share, Henkel targets a CAGR of 7% to 9%. This ambition for EPS growth includes the impact of currency developments and excludes major acquisitions as well as share buy-back. In addition, Henkel aims for continued improvements of its adjusted EBIT margin and free cash flow expansion.

“We have set financial ambitions for 2020 which reinforce our strong confidence in our ability to deliver excellent financial performance and attractive returns. We will continue to focus on cost discipline, improving our profitability, optimizing net working capital and generating strong cash flows. This will enable us to further invest in both organic and inorganic growth,” said Carsten Knobel, Chief Financial Officer of Henkel.

To reinforce its commitment to sustainability, Henkel has defined clear targets to improve its resource efficiency, for example by creating more value with less resources. Henkel has defined ambitious sustainability milestones which would result in an overall efficiency improvement of 75 per cent by 2020 compared to 2010.