Strategy
Our vision is to be the frontrunner for nonwovens innovation and sustainability. Our strategic target is to grow and improve profitability through sustainability, customer focus and efficiency.
We pursue growth by creating innovative and more sustainable nonwovens for our customers and improve our profitability through more efficient operations and a high performance culture. Our focus is on wipes. We strengthen our capabilities in Europe and the Americas and evaluate our opportunities in Asia.
We execute our strategy and aim to achieve our vision through our five strategic focus areas. We implement our Sustainability agenda as an integral part of our 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 our highest priority, and we are dedicated to ensuring the health and well-being of our employees. We foster a strong safety culture and emphasize preventive measures through open dialogue and continuous engagement. In 2024, we initiated a safety campaign to highlight the importance of safety procedures.
We continue to enhance efficiency and performance by systematically developing our people, processes and operations. We have launched several efficiency and capability 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. Our target is to use all resources efficiently and to operate with the smallest possible impacts on the environment.
The demand for sustainable products is rapidly increasing, driven by legislation and customers’ growing preference for more sustainable choices. Suominen leads the market change by actively developing and introducing new innovative and sustainable products. In 2024, we launched 11 sustainable products and the sales of sustainable products increased 87% compared to the base year of 2019.
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 2024, the share of new products was 34% of our net sales.
Great place to work
We concentrate on harnessing the organization’s positive energy, passion and commitment to deliver results.
We systematically develop employee engagement and implement targeted actions based on our global employee engagement survey. In 2024, we conducted the survey for the fifth consecutive year and the results identified both positive areas and opportunities for improvement.
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 2024, 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 an operating model in two customer focused regions – Americas and EMEA.
During the year 2024, we continued to strengthen our capabilities in sustainable products by announcing investments to our sites in Alicante, Spain and Bethune, United States. We have continued to enhance our supply chain management and operations planning to further optimize our processes and achieve world-class performance.