Under unified management, the Adhesive Technologies business sector serves a wide range of user groups with a considerable number of different adhesives, sealants and surface treatment products.

In the Craftsmen and Consumer segment, we serve private households, schools, offices, do-it-yourselfers and professional tradespeople. We offer a wide range of adhesives and sealants for refurbishment and home construction applications, such as our Pattex power adhesives, Sista sealants and Metylan home decoration products. For applications in the home, school and office, we offer adhesives under the international brands Loctite and Pattex and also glue and correction products under the Pritt brand.

In the Building Adhesives business, we focus on products and system solutions for professional craftsmenworking in construction-related trades. These include systems for tile laying, waterproofing and façade insulation, distributed under the Ceresit brand. Flooring adhesive systems are marketed internationally under the well-known Thomsit brand.

We have pooled all our activities serving industrial customers from a wide range of different sectors within our Industry business. Our product portfolio encompasses not only the high-performance Loctite adhesives and Teroson sealants but also our industrial cleaners marketed under the P3 brand. These are used in a wide range of industries, for example the automotive sector, metalworking and in the manufacture of household appliances. Within the packaging and consumer goods sectors, adhesives of the Adhesin brand are very popular with our customers in the paper industry and the graphic arts business. Under the Liofol brand, we offer high-performance laminating adhesives for the manufacture of composite films for food packaging. A range of high-tech adhesives under the Hysol brand and soldering pastes under the Multicore brand are used in the electronics industry for the manufacture of microchips and printed circuit boards.

Our centrally managed business with its different customer groupings, target industries and regions enables us both to participate in growth trends and to compensate for temporary weaknesses in individual markets, providing us with a good basis for sustainable and stable business development.

We intend to further strengthen our business specifically in Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America, North Africa and the Middle East in order to harness the dynamics of these growth regions even more effectively. In addition to gaining entry to these markets and developing our businesses under our own steam, we also intend to grow through acquisitions. With the planned purchase of the Adhesives and Electronic Materials businesses from National Starch, which together generated sales of around 1.85 billion euros in 2006, we will be able to strengthen our position in all our regions, and particularly Asia-Pacific where our revenues will double.

As part of an active portfolio management approach, we regularly scrutinize our businesses with the specific view of divesting any non-strategic or marginal activities. In the year under review, for example, we disposed of a relatively small non-core business involving dry drawing soaps for the steel industry. In order to further focus on our core activities involving adhesives, sealants and surface treatment products, we also divested our water treatment operation at the beginning of 2008.

We strive to attain the position of innovation leader in all our business segments as a proven route to achieving sustainable and profitable sales growth. Identifying specific user requirements is key to the development of successful, market-aligned solutions; this is therefore an area to which we assign especially high priority. We have established a highly modern research, training and professional development center in Shanghai, China, in order to further hone our ability to provide customer-focused products and effectively tailored system solutions. This new facility is to be used not only for our collaborations with China’s most reputable universities but also for the training and further qualification of adhesives specialists working for our industrial customers. As a resource, it will enable us not only to further enhance customer loyalty but also to apprise customers as to how they can use our complex adhesive systems successfully in their production processes.