Strategy - key impacts, risks and opportunities
GRI 102-14,15
Oerlikon has a vision of the future in which innovation drives productivity in industry, promotes prosperity
that elevates the quality of life and achieves a standard of performance that generates benefits
with global impact. We see our company as integral to making that vision a reality, and so we evaluate
opportunities and risks as a means of assessing our ability to sustain that level of impact. By balancing risks and costs against our capacity for developing and commercializing significant innovations, we maximize our ability to improve our customers’ operations, products and services, enhance the quality of life in our communities and help to reduce the environmental impacts on our planet.
What does it mean to add value for an advanced tomorrow? Seeing the depth within that statement requires an understanding of how Oerlikon approaches sustainability and technology leadership. When we pursue innovation through research and development, we are really engaging our capacity to give simultaneous priority to two objectives. One is to enhance the benefits that our solutions deliver. The second is to assume our share of responsibility as custodians of our planet by mitigating the environmental impact of our customers’ and our own operations, as measured by such mission-critical metrics as reductions in energy consumption and emissions.
Transforming that mission from an ideal to a practical reality requires a sustainability strategy that we
envision as having three overlapping quadrants of impact: governance, people and society, and our
Environment (see the sustainability strategy below). This perspective strengthens Oerlikon’s capacity to manage its business in a manner that thoroughly integrates sustainability principles and standards — which, in turn, supports our ability to monitor our continued compliance with globally recognized corporate governance standards for ethical business conduct.
Our approach to governance takes into account not just how we run our business and manage our
operations, but also how we perceive our role as active and direct contributors to achieving the United Nations SDGs. While some companies might see these as separate and distinct components, our holistic view is that they are integrated and interdependent.
To bring our commitment to fruition, we employ both our sustainability strategy and a spectrum of programs, and we regard their success as a litmus test for our excellence in governance as much as in technological innovation.
