Foreword

Leading beyond chemistry is at the heart of our aspiration to make life better—both now and for future generations. The customer industries and end-markets where we do that vary enormously. What does not vary is how we fulfill our promise: driven by the desire not to be satisfied with the status quo but to carry on researching, probe more deeply, and broaden our understanding.

Continuous improvement is the hallmark of the chemical industry. And it is particularly important at a time when our business is confronted simultaneously with challenges from geopolitical, ecological, and social crises. Consequently, reducing energy consumption and saving resources are continuing to gain in significance. Sustainability is becoming a yardstick of corporate resilience, precisely because a sustainability-focused management approach is increasingly important for economic as well as ecological reasons. That includes massive efforts to increase the availability of green energies, transforming existing production chains into circular processes, and working to future-proof the products and solutions we provide.

Those are also the top topics identified in our most recent materiality analysis. We see that as valuable confirmation of everything we initiated in the reporting period under the motto Next Generation Evonik. We use our innovative capability and the growth of our Next Generation Solutions to address changing customer and market requirements. Our goal is to increase the proportion of particularly sustainable products and solutions in our portfolio from 43 percent at present to over 50 percent by 2030. To achieve that, we are investing around €3 billion. A further €700 million is earmarked for the transformation of our production plants and processes: by investing in Next Generation Technologies, which will help us achieve our ambitious climate and environmental targets. For example, by reducing our scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2030. That is consistent with the commitment we made to the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi)¹ in the reporting period.

Realizing this ambitious agenda begins in the hearts and minds of our global workforce of more than 30,000 employees. Therefore, it is very important to keep a clear focus on the human resources side of the transformation as well in the coming years. Consequently, Next Generation Culture is the third element we are using to anchor sustainability in Evonik’s core processes—from our attractiveness as a strong employer through recruitment, training, and continuing professional development to contem­porary performance incentives and remuneration models. We made good headway with this in 2022. In this report, we aim to give you extensive insight into how we translate leading beyond chemistry into our day-to-day business. Today. Tomorrow. And always better.