Company profile

Company profile

Ontex is a leading international personal hygiene group.

Ontex was founded in Belgium in 1979 as a supplier of underpads for hospitals, clinics and care homes. Today we have offices and manufacturing plants in Europe, North and East Africa, Australia, the Middle East and the Americas. Ontex is headquartered in Aalst, Belgium and went public in June 2014.

Company strategy

Our strategic vision is to be the number one partner of choice for partner retail brands and healthcare brands, in Baby Care, Feminine care and Adult Care, with leadership positions in Europe and North America. Our mission is to create a world where everyone can embrace life’s many changes, like having a baby to coping with aging.

We have grown significantly since our founding through organic growth and several key acquisitions, and we continue to evolve. We are sharpening our focus on our core markets to be more efficient as a company. It is for this reason that we are strongly focused on divesting our branded emerging market businesses.

We believe that driving growth with sustainable healthy margins requires a fundamental shift in our competitiveness. We have set out five strategic priorities to achieve this.

Five strategic priorities

True customer centricity

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Ontex has room for growth that we can unlock by restoring sustained competitive advantage in an intensely competitive environment. While innovation and cost efficiency are essential to our competitiveness, being truly customer-centric across the entire organization is a must for sustained success in the market. In our journey towards customer centricity, we aim to deliver better service, build trust and foster closer working relationships with our customers to gain share among partner brands manufacturers and/or drive retailer brands penetration. We offer our customers a range of consumer-relevant products that allows them to differentiate themselves in the market while leveraging scale internally to manage complexity efficiently.

Competitive innovation

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We are responding directly to the consumers’ and customers’ needs by providing high-quality, innovative and affordable products to retail partners and relevant solutions for institutional healthcare. To remain competitive, we must deliver innovation fast to our retail partners. Our innovation priorities and ways of working are geared towards greater efficiency and speed in deployment. We leverage our global product platforms with intentional design for scale, we collaborate closely with engineering and suppliers to get primary, privileged and exclusive access to the latest developments, and we ringfence access to development lines.

Strong sustainability performance

Sustainability is a key priority for our long-term business success and aligns with our corporate purpose. Sustainability is also a key priority for our customers, and to be the #1 partner of choice for our partners, we must provide solutions that allow them to deliver their own sustainability agenda. Our sustainability agenda is set across four key pillars:

  • Climate action with Scope III strategies integrated with our suppliers and customers. We want to reduce emissions across our operations (scope 1-2) with 80% by 2030 and with 25% in our value chain (scope 3) by 2030 compared with 2020.
  • Plastic reduction through development of circular solutions across our operations, products and packaging. Our Innovation agenda supports our circularity efforts.
  • Building trust through our commitment to an inclusive and fair society. We aim for gender parity and continuous improvement in occupational health and safety, with the ambition of zero occupational accidents by 2030.
  • Sustainable and transparent supply chain by driving positive change throughout our supply chain to protect people, climate and biodiversity, and by ensuring compliance with the laws and regulations of the markets in which we operate.

Cost-efficient operations

Operations

Running cost-efficient operations is critical for us to be able to provide affordable essential products to our customers whilst ensuring sustainable value creation for our shareholders. Transforming our operations towards optimum cost competitiveness is a key priority for us. This transformation relies on end-to-end complexity reduction, assets upgrade and optimization, network optimization and continuous operational excellence. We are committed to delivering 4% cost reduction year-on-year.

Lean, focused, performance-driven organization

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We ensure laser-focus across the entire organization on our key strategic priorities. We are in the progress of divesting our emerging markets businesses and we are also further strengthening focus within our core markets.

Delivering strong business performance is a team effort. We are building a lean and performance-driven organization to improve our ability to execute. We have a simple and flattened organizational structure to enable fast decision-making and execution, and strong cross-functional teamwork. We continuously seek to optimize our ways of working. We empower our teams and strengthen the resilience and engagement of our people through leadership. We leverage reward systems that focus on alignment with shareholders, financial and other interests and drive a high level of accountability and teamwork.

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