Bayer is a global enterprise with core competencies in the fields of health care, nutrition and high-tech materials. Our products and services are designed to benefit people and improve their quality of life. At the same time we want to create value through innovation, growth and improved earning power.
We have set out to create an enterprise that is keenly focused on its customers, its strengths, its potential and the markets of the future: a top international company renowned for product quality, employee skills, economic performance and innovative strength, and committed to increasing corporate value and achieving sustained growth. The Bayer brand symbolizes these goals throughout the world.
To sharpen our focus on innovation and growth, we have carried out a strategic realignment, placing our businesses into three subgroups that operate virtually independently and are fully aligned to their respective markets. They are supported by competent service companies. With our distinctive knowledge of people, animals, plants and materials, we intend to focus in future on the areas of
- health care,
- nutrition,
- high-tech materials.
By applying our skills in these areas we aim to
- prevent, diagnose, alleviate and cure diseases,
- contribute to ensuring a sufficient supply of high-quality food for an ever-increasing global population,
- help people to lead fulfilling, active lives through the contributions made by our products in the fields of communications, mobility, sports and home living.
These activities offer access to major growth markets. This mission statement underscores our willingness as an inventor company to help shape the future and our determination to come up with innovations that benefit humankind.
Of special importance in this respect are:
- new products emerging from our active substance research,
- the consumer health business,
- the growth markets of Asia,
- new areas such as biotechnology and nanotechnology.
Our corporate strategy is aligned to our mission.
Innovation and Growth
Bayer is an inventor company infused with a pioneering spirit. We invest extensively in technology because innovation is the foundation for competitiveness and growth, and thus for our future success. By focusing our resources on the expanding areas of our innovative HealthCare, CropScience and MaterialScience businesses, we lay the foundations for sustained, longterm growth in future markets. We believe synergistic potential exists in the use of our technologies by more than one of our subgroups.
Here we draw on the expertise that our scientists have acquired over decades of interdisciplinary research. Innovative applications for biotechnology and nanotechnology also hold promise for us in the future.
Supplementing the subgroups’ targeted R&D activities is our subsidiary Bayer Innovation GmbH, set up specifically to turn innovative project ideas into new business concepts. This company not only looks at individual products but also seeks to open up new business opportunities, such as those offered by the combination of materials and active substances in medical applications, or the continuing development of optical data storage media for security systems.
Creating Value
Another core element of our corporate strategy is rigorous value management. Our performance-related compensation systems reward and incentivize the achievement of our value-creation targets.
Portfolio management will continue to play a crucial role in the Bayer Group. We aim to continue improving our market positions through strategic acquisitions and alliances. We will divest activities that in the long term are unlikely to yield a return exceeding their capital costs.
Common values and leadership principles form the basis for our day-to-day activities.
- Our employees throughout the world, with their abundant knowledge and their innovative capabilities, seek to play an active role in shaping the future on the basis of common values.
- We respect and value the ethnic and cultural diversity of all the people who work for Bayer, mindful that our success is founded on their skills and their commitment.
- We aim to achieve a sustained increase in corporate value in the interests of our stockholders, customers, employees, other business partners and society as a whole.
- We seek to retain the confidence of our stakeholders through the quality, performance and reliability of our products and services as well as through integrity, flexibility and openness in all our business dealings. We will strive for continual improvement in all these areas.
- Our actions are guided by the knowledge that we can only remain competitive by adapting to changing global conditions.
- Our customers remain the focus of our activities. We will work with them in a spirit of partnership to create value for both sides.
- Our organizational structure encourages individual responsibility and entrepreneurship.
- We support our employees in both their professional and their personal development, helping them to deploy their skills and their creativity for their personal success and that of our business enterprise.
- We acknowledge and accept our role as a socially and ethically responsible corporate citizen and are committed to the principles of sustainable development.
- We will strive to actively contribute to the discussion of socially relevant issues by engaging in a dialogue with interested sections of society.
- We believe our technical and commercial expertise entails a duty to work for the good of all humankind, to demonstrate social commitment and to make a lasting and positive contribution to sustainable and environmentally compatible development.
- We place paramount importance on living our values in our work. The leadership principles on which we assess our managers are therefore based on these values.
