Strategy

Progress in Strategy

Operational excellence

We continuously improve the efficiency and quality of our operations, promote occupational health and safety of our employees, and increase accountability and cost awareness throughout the organization.

Safety is a top priority for us, and we are committed to protecting and improving the health and safety of our employees. We believe in preventive actions and that a strong safety culture is created through an open and continuous dialogue. In 2023, we initiated a safety campaign to encourage all employees to stop and think before acting. 

We continue to work on our efficiency and performance by systematically developing our people, our processes and operations. We have launched several efficiency initiatives and actively share best practices between our sites to drive improvement in this area.

Sustainability leadership

We leverage our innovation and piloting capabilities, pioneering fiber-based nonwovens know-how and our unique asset base to achieve a leading position in the sustainable nonwovens market. 

The requirements for more sustainable products have increased rapidly, with legislation and customers’ growing interest towards more sustainable choices as the main drivers. We are leading the market change by actively developing and introducing new products to meet the growing demand. During 2023, we launched 12 sustainable products and the sales of sustainable products increased 79% compared to the base year of 2019.

Our target is to use resources efficiently and to operate with the smallest possible impacts on the environment. We have set concrete reduction targets for four environmental impact KPIs in our own operations: greenhouse gas emissions, energy consumption, water consumption and waste to landfill. 

As part of our work on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, all our European sites have shifted entirely to fossil-free electricity in 2021 and our Paulínia site in Brazil during 2023.

Differentiate with innovation and commercial excellence

We offer best-in-class products and build close relationships and collaboration with our key customers. 

Our versatile and experienced R&D team together with our pilot line capabilities enable our industry-leading innovation and product development. A close collaboration with customers plays an important role in our innovation work. The share of new products of our net sales reflects our strong ability to innovate and meet the market needs – in 2023, the share of new products exceeded 35 % of our net sales. 

We made several commercial excellence improvement actions during the year in order to reach the full potential of our competitive advantages.

Great place to work

We concentrate on harnessing the organization’s positive energy, passion and commitment to deliver results. 

We are systematically developing employee engagement and implementing targeted actions based on our global employee engagement survey. In 2023, we conducted the survey for the fourth consecutive year. The results identified both positive areas and opportunities for improvement. In the 2023 survey, we saw improvement in nearly all of the survey areas. 

We strive to build a high-performance culture in which people are encouraged to exceed expectations and are enabled to perform to their full potential. In 2023, we continued to support the development of our personnel and teams with various development and training programs. 

Dual operating model

We optimize our operations through separate operating models for our standard and specialty products close to our customers in two customer focused regions – Americas and Europe.

During the year, we have continued to strengthen our capabilities in sustainable products, e.g., by finalizing an investment project to enhance and upgrade one of our production lines in Nakkila, Finland. We have also further developed our supply chain management and operations planning to even better support our target to optimize our operations and to meet the world class level.