Our Strategy – „Klöckner & Co 2025: Leveraging Strengths”

In implementing our “Klöckner & Co 2025: Leveraging Strengths” strategy, we focus primarily on four levers: Customer Growth, Leveraging Assets & Partner Network, Digitalization & Value Chain Automation, and Operational Excellence. With our strategy, we are building on the strengths we have created in recent years and leveraging them to take the next evolutionary step, leading Klöckner & Co into a successful future.

We aim to generate added value for all of our Company’s stakeholders. And we want customers and business partners to benefit from seamlessly integrated, digitalized and automated processes. For employees, we aim to foster a culture of empowerment and collaboration, upskilling them for the future and enabling them to grow and develop. For shareholders, our focus on a higher level of profitability also means a focus on the sustainable financial success of their investment in Klöckner & Co. Furthermore, we strive to make a positive impact on society and the environment.

We aim to establish Klöckner & Co as the leading one-stop shop for steel, other materials, equipment and processing services in Europe and the Americas, to bring the digital and the physical sides of our business closer together and to continuously improve our internal and external networks. Inefficiencies in low-margin steel and metal distribution are still primarily caused by linear supply chains and lack of transparency. By integrating third parties while digitalizing and automating core processes, we can eliminate existing inefficiencies in the value chain and significantly reduce our variable costs.

We always aspire to exceed our customers’ expectations and maximize their benefit. By focusing uncompromisingly on their needs, we aim to achieve the highest customer satisfaction in the industry. This requires an extension of our product and service portfolio and larger regional coverage. The agreed acquisition of National Material of Mexico allows us to expand our business in North America and increase our presence in Mexico, which is an important region for our automotive and industrial customers. As a one-stop shop with a fast-track, best-in-class user experience, we aim to grow our client base and increase our share of wallet: customers will buy more from us, and more customers will buy from us.

To improve efficiency, we aim to integrate our partners more deeply into internal processes along the value chain while optimizing network and asset utilization through increased international collaboration. We also plan to bring on board new partners with complementary product ranges and competencies outside
Klöckner & Co’s core portfolio.

Building on our pioneering role in the steel industry, we are further exploiting the significant potential of digitalization and extending it to the level of automation. We develop innovative solutions and continue to digitalize our internal core processes. With seamless, end-to-end process integration featuring a very high degree of digitalization and automation, we can take process speed and efficiency to unparalleled levels along the entire value chain. Our goal is “zero touch,” meaning value generation with minimum manual effort. In the first quarter 2023, our proprietary AI solution Kloeckner Assistant handled more than €280 million in sales. This is an established tool for automated quotation and order processing.

In order to deliver the most efficient solutions and best service to our customers, we are continuously improving our operations. Excellence is our benchmark. By eliminating inefficiencies in our internal processes, we are optimizing our operational results and increasing profitability. We continue to further advance excellence in operations and sales through process automation, increased cost and process transparency, data-driven decision-making and organizational measures.

Under our Nexigen^® umbrella brand, we have focused our sustainable product and service portfolio across the Group, providing transparent, CO₂-reduced solutions in the categories of materials, processing, logistics, circularity solutions (closed-loop) and comprehensive Sustainability Advisory Services for sustainable customer solutions. In this way, we are already supporting customers to reliably source CO₂-reduced steel and metal products, while our smart software solutions give them full visibility into the carbon footprint of the products they buy. To provide our customers with optimum support in establishing sustainable value chains, we have introduced rating scales for our CO₂-reduced steel, stainless steel and aluminum products. These scales are rooted in international, science-based standards and categorize the CO₂-reduced materials according to their certified emissions along the entire value chain from resource extraction to production and processing, or cradle to Klöckner exit gate. They serve as a guide and a comparison tool when determining the carbon footprint of end products for customers. Through numerous partnerships, we already offer our customers CO₂-reduced steel and metal products today. Klöckner & Co aims for the two lowest-carbon-footprint categories – “Pro” (< 700kg CO₂/t) and “Prime” (< 400 kg CO₂/t) – to account for over 30% of the total product range by 2025 and 50% by 2030.

In addition, as of the beginning of 2023, we now provide customers with an individual Product Carbon Footprint (PCF) for almost every product in our portfolio. This allows customers to reliably, transparently and easily see the carbon footprint of a product purchased from Klöckner & Co. With the Nexigen® PCF Algorithm, we have developed an innovative tool whose automated PCF calculation methodology is certified by TÜV SÜD. The Nexigen® PCF Algorithm’s methodology for calculating the PCF follows the internationally recognized Greenhouse Gas Protocol and ISO 14067, ref. 14040 and 14044, and, in accordance with those standards, calculates the product’s cradle-to-customer entry gate emissions. As a result, our customers receive information on the extent to which Klöckner materials can contribute to reducing the carbon footprint of their business activities and their own end products, and can reliably include the cumulative carbon emissions of their products in emissions calculations across the entire value chain, from resource extraction to production and delivery at the customer’s factory (hence “cradle to customer entry gate”). 

In addition to the strategic opportunities we see in the sustainable transformation of the steel industry, we are meeting our responsibility to reduce our own emissions and those of our upstream and downstream supply chains. As part of this, we have designated the reduction of carbon emissions as a non-financial target for variable remuneration of the Management Board, the entire first management level below the Group Management Board and additional executives at levels two and three.

We are the first company in the world to have our net zero carbon targets recognized by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) as science-based in the standard validation process in accordance with the latest standards. Klöckner & Co is thus committed to reducing emissions in the entire value chain to net zero by 2050.

We focus on specific actions to avoid emissions and work in close collaboration with customers and suppliers to achieve this goal. As this is a continuous, long-term process, in addition to our reduction measures, we offset all of our Scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions, although not in emissions accounting. This means we are already carbon-neutral today.