Industrial excellence and simplifying our execution model

Industrial excellence

We know there’s significant value to be gained through improving our operations. We’re addressing bottlenecks in business-critical supply chains, under-investment in key sites and low capacity utilization, in line with our industrial excellence program launched in 2023. This initiative continues to gather pace.

In Decorative Paints, the focus for 2025 remained on optimizing our manufacturing footprint in EMEA. As part of this optimization, we’re closing selected sites and transferring production to regional anchor sites where we have invested in automation and equipment efficiency improvements.

In Performance Coatings, our efforts were concentrated on footprint consolidation for Industrial Coatings in North America, alongside productivity initiatives and service improvements for our businesses across the region. These actions supported stronger service levels and shorter lead times, with productivity improvements clearly visible across our anchor sites. Business continuity was preserved, with company-wide OTIF (on-time, in-full) maintained above 90% throughout this period of significant change.

Simplifying our execution model

We also made strong progress in achieving other variable manufacturing cost savings through the reduction of operational leakage, shipment consolidation, enablement of dual sourcing and rationalization of packaging.

In addition to the industrial excellence program focused on optimizing our manufacturing sites, we’re also working to streamline and optimize our functional organization. We’re simplifying operations, accelerating decision-making and streamlining the company’s management structure.