Dear Readers and Friends of Symrise,

Reflecting on the year 2024, we have ample reasons to be proud of Symrise’s accomplishments and attribute these successes to the dedication and efforts of our teams. We successfully navigated through geopolitical crises, rising inflation rates, and high levels of volatility in the markets in which we play. Despite the challenging environment we managed to increase our organic sales by 8.7% to a record level of around EUR 5 billion. Since going public in 2006, we have managed to grow year by year.

We also successfully increased our profitability, generating an operating income (EBITDA) of over EUR 1 billion for the first time in the company’s history. This remarkable performance was made possible by the efficiencies we identified, and it would not have been possible without the dedication and extremely high degree of expertise of our people.

Our strategy of focusing on sustainable, profitable growth, a strong and diversified portfolio, and efficiency gains has paid off. We have made the company largely resilient to crises and have positioned ourselves to compete in the marketplace. Another key aspect of our future success is the way we collaborate. For that reason, we started a change program, named ONE SYM. The program focuses on collaboratively defining our ONE Symrise culture compass: four shared core values translated into an actionable framework. It is a collective work born from Symrisers’ voices. The starting point to execute our new ONE Symrise strategy, which was presented at the Capital Market Day in Holzminden in November last year. For this reason, it did not take us long to come up with the title for this year’s Annual Report: “Creating ONE Symrise”.

The ONE Symrise strategy aims to harness and amplify the potential of our company toward sustainable, profitable growth. Our strategy focuses on the already known, but rebalanced, three core pillars: Growth, Efficiency and Portfolio. To focus on these priorities, we established the following key initiatives: Building a ONE Innovation Ecosystem, implementing best practices and adapting the organization across Symrise. In addition, we prioritized ONE CARE to ensure a unified approach toward health and wellness. A crucial component in achieving our objectives is gaining a deep understanding of the market environment to adapt to changes. Our ability to decode the market’s direction and megatrends will drive our business and put us in the forefront of the industry to develop fit-for-purpose solutions. Setting up a holistic, customer centric ONE Innovation Ecosystem will enhance our capability to fully leverage growth opportunities. We intend to use this system to further increase our share of innovative products and services, for example in the health & wellness sector, which is rapidly growing.

With the ONE Symrise strategy, we have confirmed our 2025 and mid-term growth expectation until 2028 of 5 % to 7 % (CAGR). For 2025, we expect an EBITDA margin of around 21 %. In the mid-term we aim to achieve an EBITDA margin in the region of 21 % to 23 %. This also underscores our commitment to sustainably increasing profitability.

All our activities are designed to generate sustainable business. We released our first sustainability strategy 15 years ago, and we continue to refine this strategy, measuring our success along the way. Our sustainability agenda consists of four pillars: Footprint, Innovation, Sourcing and Care. It sets clear targets. Last year, we made progress once again to be resource efficient and to minimize our environmental impact.