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Our strategy

Sustainability + Innovation = Growth

Croda provides mission-critical, novel ingredients that represent a fraction of customers’ costs but are vital to the performance of their products. We combine market-leading innovation with sustainability leadership to deliver profit growth, ahead of sales growth and ahead of cost growth.

Innovation is our key differentiator, creating new market and technology niches.

We derive commercial value from our position as a sustainability leader by providing ingredients that are bio-based, biodegradable and have lower carbon footprints than alternatives. We are building on this position by expanding our portfolio and providing best-in-class validation data to enable customer decision-making.

Strengthen to grow Consumer Care

In Consumer Care, our leadership in innovative and sustainable ingredients, and the breadth of our ingredient portfolio, customer base and geographic reach are our key strengths. Our strategy is to localise the delivery of innovation, ‘widen the gap’ in our sustainability leadership, and prioritise selected countries.


Expand to grow Life Sciences

In Life Sciences, the move to biologics is the principal technology trend over the next decade. In Agriculture, our strategy is to help customers meet the sustainability challenges of conventional pesticide delivery and create new systems for biopesticides. In Pharma, our strategy is to broaden our portfolio of delivery systems and bioprocessing aids, while driving the conversion of our pipeline opportunities into revenue.

Reporting Datapack 2024

Our strategy delivers:

Sustainability

Sustainability

Strategic progress in 2024 We were recognised for our sustainability leadership by EcoVadis, MSCI and FTSE4Good. Sales of sustainable ingredients, such as our ECO surfactants, continued to grow. Cradle-to-gate carbon footprint data is now available for >2000 ingredients in Life Sciences and Industrial Specialties as well as Consumer Care. We met many of our interim milestones including for Scope 1 and 2 emissions, and remain on track to meet our Science-Based Target (see page 17). We achieved our target of zero process waste to landfill across our manufacturing sites. Croda Foundation is supporting 46 projects to improve lives globally
innovation

Innovation

Strategic progress in 2024 Our R&D teams now report directly into Consumer Care and Life Sciences, ensuring that our priorities are customer driven. New and Protected Products (NPP) increased to 35% of total sales (2023: 33%). Group NPP sales grew 6% in constant currency. We created new ingredients including an anti-ageing active derived from a marine microorganism, hair care ingredients derived from ceramides, and an aid to cell growth for biopharma processing. Application-focused innovation increased, driven directly by customer requests. We initiated more external R&D partnerships in areas such as biotech.