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Asia Pacific is a key growth area for AkzoNobel and, despite a slowdown in the fourth quarter, our results for 2008 exceeded our plan and quarterly forecasts. We continued to grow our volumes at double-digit rates and increased market share in all our target countries, including China, India and Indonesia. Our growth in the important premium segments – for both interior and exterior coatings – far exceeded the market growth rates. Operational performanceWe undertook various steps to meet the challenges of the changing economic environment. We had to carefully balance our growth expectations with maintaining margins during the period of rapid raw material price increases. We did this by promoting and driving sales in the premium segments, implementing price increases across the board in all countries and, most importantly, improving our internal efficiencies by running an active and aggressive value engineering and creation program. This program involves people from R&D, procurement and marketing to ensure we optimize formulations that meet our customer needs at the lowest possible cost. We also benefited from the integration of ICI’s businesses. This allowed us to rationalize our manufacturing facilities in China, Vietnam and Indonesia into the larger, more productive sites. In China, a new latex factory was commissioned early in the year, which increased the benefits we derive from in-house technologies. |
Tony Britt Revenue  |
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