Our Execution Priorities

Our strategy builds on our strengths and focuses on the development of our three core capabilities in customer focus, application engineering and materials science. To continue the development of our core capabilities we have three execution priorities:

  1. We are creating a ‘big positive difference’, making sure we govern our business the right way, look after the environment, look after our people and operate to high ethical standards. This priority supports our focus on living and breathing our commitments on inclusion, treating people fairly, reducing waste, managing our water consumption, and reducing emissions.
  2. To ‘delight the customer’ we are following on from our foundational work on sales effectiveness, working to shape our product and service offerings further based on customer needs, with the overall objective of making our business more customer-centric. We will be gathering customer feedback during 2022 through a range of channels and using that to understand our customer segments in more detail. This will enable us to tailor our product, service and support offerings more closely to customer needs.
  3. Many of our customers have an increasing need to reduce their energy consumption and CO2e emissions; these customers need our help. Our ‘innovate to grow’ priority supports our focus on working with the customer to innovate in traditional heavy industries whilst also contributing to greener technologies for the future.

We want to accelerate our growth, by winning in our core markets and increasing our exposure to four faster-growing market segments: clean energy, clean transportation, semiconductors and healthcare. We have been focusing our product development and business development efforts in these markets over the last several years to develop new and differentiated products that solve hard problems for our customers.

  • Clean energy. Growth in energy storage, brushes and slip rings for onshore wind applications and ceramic and carbon products used in solar panel manufacture; 
  • Clean transportation. Growth in our rail collector business for metro and main rail applications, and in water and vacuum pump components for electric vehicle applications; 
  • Semiconductors. Growth from carbon and ceramic consumable supply into key semiconductor process steps including crystal growth, deposition, lithography and etch; 
  • Healthcare. Growth from medical imaging and supply of low temperature insulation for medicine and vaccine transport and storage.

During 2021, organic constant-currency* revenue growth in these segments was 22% (excluding one-off solar projects*), which represented 20% of our revenue overall.