“In all our businesses, our absolute priority is to listen closely to customers so we can respond to their needs today while helping them anticipate those of tomorrow.” What are the implications of your ambition to be the reference in your businesses? Being the reference implies a strategy of overall excellence that is particularly demanding because it goes beyond simply striving for leadership in terms of sales volumes or geographic expansion. Our goal is to be systematically in the best position to serve our customers as effectively as possible on a daily basis, and over the long term. We want to be an active player in sustainable habitat solutions and provide technologies that change daily life, while ensuring the responsible development of our activities in a way that respects both the environment and individual health and safety, and by forging solid partnerships with our surrounding communities. We focus on preserving this balance, day after day. This is possible due to the outstanding commitment of all our teams, which I deeply appreciate. Thanks to their work, Saint-Gobain gains greater recognition each day as a company of reference in all of its markets. What are your growth paths? We will continue to implement our strategy with determination. We will continue with our investments and acquisitions in high-growth-rate countries and in high-performance materials, and we will continue to strengthen our distribution networks on the most advanced markets. In this way, we will boost the potential for the Group’s organic growth through the development of new services, in particular by leveraging digital technology. More generally, we will continue to increase the share of our high value added solutions together with those co-developed with our customers. Speaking of customers, what are you doing for them specifically? In all our businesses, our absolute priority is to listen closely to customers so we can respond to their needs today while helping them anticipate those of tomorrow. On a daily basis, in addition to offering the solutions of reference in our various markets, we are constantly adapting our products and services to make it easier for our customers to focus on their core businesses, for example by reducing their administrative constraints, by offering training courses that best meet their needs, by aligning our research capabilities with their development projects or by strengthening our logistics services or mobile applications. To help customers anticipate their future needs, we are working as closely as we can with them on the solutions of tomorrow, whether this means introducing highly innovative products, planning for changing regulations in their markets or developing new services, for example in the area of digital technologies. Pierre-André de Chalendar Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (Update: October, 2015)
