Life Science
Our Life Science business sector is maintaining its position as a global leader in the approximately € 220 billion life science market. Although it is navigating market headwinds, such as funding constraints, geopolitical shifts and evolving customer needs, the long-term fundamentals of the industry remain strong. Alongside these fundamentals, we anticipate a 4%–6% annual market growth rate, thereby presenting numerous opportunities for our Life Science business to deliver value to customers while enabling tomorrow’s medical breakthroughs with best-in-class science, technologies and expertise.
Our strategic plan focuses on driving sustainable growth in sales and EBITDA pre through a continued focus on academic, biotech and pharmaceutical as well as industrial and diagnostic customers, and by further elevating customer experience and expanding portfolio leadership. We will continue to address the unique needs of our diverse customer base and drive continuous improvement through efficient processes and systems. This will strengthen customer relationships while accelerating innovation with empowered teams, streamlined processes and greater agility to support both organic and inorganic growth.
Recognized for our broad portfolio of products, services and solutions that meet the highest scientific and technical standards, we are aligning our offerings with the emerging needs of target customers. We will further advance our development of new products by continuing to increase our research and development (R&D) allocation, pursuing bigger and bolder innovation projects and continuing to drive partnerships in high-growth areas. This approach will strengthen our portfolio with new technology anchors and enhance our R&D returns through new products. We will continue to explore complementary inorganic opportunities through targeted partnerships as well as M&A to expand our offerings in high-potential segments.
By combining scientific expertise with cutting-edge technologies, we will remain a critical enabler of tomorrow’s medical breakthroughs by offering the best products, services and solutions along the molecule and therapeutic modality journey.
Through continuous improvement initiatives, we are making business processes and integrated supply chain operations more agile, resilient and customer-centric by continuing to streamline our operating model, reinforcing our operational backbone and enhancing our global footprint through regionalization and localization.
To further drive medium-term growth, we announced a refined go-to-market approach to further enhance customer experience in October 2025. The new business unit structure, which went live in January 2026, strengthens our Life Science strategy by expanding portfolio leadership, amplifying customer experience and driving operational excellence, positioning us to be more agile in a dynamic market environment.
Process Solutions continues to provide embedded solutions for pharma and biotech manufacturers, supporting critical biopharmaceutical processes. Our newly established Advanced Solutions business unit, which combines the Life Science Services business and parts of the Science and Lab Solutions business, offers specialized products and services delivered through high-touch commercial models, such as contract testing services as well as diagnostic and regulated materials. Discovery Solutions, which comprises parts of our Science and Lab Solutions business, is our digital-first platform for fast, convenient access to high-quality biology and chemistry catalog products.
Our continued focus on the needs of our customers will unite our teams globally around our purpose to impact life and health with science.
Healthcare
The global pharmaceutical industry continues to deliver robust growth with attractive margins. While the macroeconomic and geopolitical environment has become increasingly volatile over the last few years, the impact of cyclical and crisis-related market fluctuations on the industry’s underlying growth drivers – such as demographic and epidemiological shifts, increasing access to medicines and the emergence of innovative new therapeutic approaches – remains comparatively modest. This has resulted in relatively consistent demand for pharmaceutical products. At the same time, cost containment measures introduced worldwide continue to exert pressure on the growth of the global pharmaceutical market. Likewise, uncertainty surrounding tariffs and special agreements adds complexity to the market environment. Our diversified portfolio and geographical footprint have proven resilient when it comes to responding to the dynamic development of our markets and represent a solid foundation for the future success of our Healthcare business sector.
In developed and, increasingly, in emerging markets, the majority of pharmaceutical market growth and long-term profitability stems from innovation. In the same vein, we aim to secure the medium- and long-term growth of our Healthcare business sector by launching innovative products, while our mature portfolio provides us with a strong footing that enables us to continue investing in innovation. We remain steadfast in our ambition to continue growing as a global specialty innovator and aim to progress through three strategic imperatives:
The first strategic imperative is to continue optimizing profitability in our legacy business. Building on our solid foundation, we strive to achieve sustainable and profitable growth by making targeted investments in life cycle management and geographical expansion of our established brands. Together, these efforts will strike the balance between delivering innovative new medicines in developed markets and leveraging our strengths in further markets.
The second strategic imperative is to deliver on product launches within our newly established Rare Diseases franchise. In July 2025, we completed the acquisition of SpringWorks. Moving forward, our priority is to successfully maximize the impact of the global launches of Ogsiveo® (nirogacestat) and Gomekli®/Ezmekly® (mirdametinib), leveraging the global presence of the company to reach more people living with rare and often debilitating tumors. These capabilities and synergies will further support the successful launch of pimicotinib, our late-stage registrational pipeline asset. As we prioritize further expansion into rare tumors and adjacent disease areas, we will continue to build a pipeline through both organic additions and external innovation.
The third strategic imperative is to continue investing to build a diversified and risk-balanced pipeline portfolio with more opportunities being pursued, thereby enabling a sustainable growth outlook. We will achieve this by focusing on the execution of key organic pipeline programs and by continuing to pursue external innovation, concentrating on areas where we have the best chance of success thanks to our scale and capabilities. Our investment decisions are informed by the diligent trade-off of clinical versus commercial risks in our pipeline portfolio, while we drive disciplined diversification across therapeutic areas.
We continue to focus on specialty medicines. Our approach involves developing deep internal expertise and insights, from internal research to commercialization, and augmenting this by recruiting external talent. In addition, we intend to engage in strategic collaborations. To optimize the holistic value and focus of our pipeline, we continuously monitor and assess the potential of our pipeline candidates based on clinical data, strategic fit and financial criteria to determine the best way forward. To maximize the results of our R&D investments and ensure their long-term sustainability, we are continuously adjusting our R&D model to expand our innovation capabilities. Furthermore, we aim to increase our intake of external innovation in line with industry practice to bolster our pipeline with further attractive business opportunities.
Electronics
Our ambition is to be a leading partner in materials, material-related solutions and services for the electronics industry by maximizing added value for our customers with our Materials Intelligence™. We have successfully taken on a leading role in the semiconductor ecosystem and already serve the world’s most important industry players with one of the broadest portfolios in our Semiconductor Solutions business unit. The semiconductor ecosystem is one of the most innovative, fast-paced and scientifically advanced industries. Our portfolio and holistic innovation mindset are ideally suited to helping the industry overcome technological challenges and enabling next-generation semiconductors. Our increasingly data-driven solutions are designed to address all areas of 3D densification, including miniaturization, performance optimization, vertical stacking, and heterogeneous integration.
We are investing in innovations and sustainable alternatives to help the industry overcome its sustainability challenges. Recognizing the increased demand for sustainable solutions, we see an opportunity to offer products that are unique in the market and lead the industry toward more resource-efficient production of end products.
The medium- and long-term growth prospects of the industry remain very attractive. The most important end-market growth drivers are the demand for next-generation chips and the end-device replacement cycle accelerated by this, accompanied by an increasing semiconductor content per device. Both growth drivers will have a positive impact on Electronics’ business in wafer processing and microchip packaging.
To produce ever more powerful and energy-efficient microchips, innovation in novel materials will be even more essential, as they are a key driver of all areas of 3D densification. Aligning our activities with our customer roadmaps enables us to embed portfolio innovations early in the design cycle, strengthening both customer intimacy and recurring revenue visibility.
We are following a horizontal and vertical integration strategy, building end-to-end capabilities spanning the innovation-to-production value chain.
Additionally, we expect that expertise in optoelectronics, managed by our Optronics business unit, will become even more important. Semiconductor and optical technologies will increasingly converge. To address this growing field of convergence, we will utilizie Materials Intelligence™ to leverage our deep technological expertise in optics and chemistry throughout crucial production processes in the electronics industry. Through our acquisition of Unity-SC SAS, France, in 2024, we have significantly expanded our optical technology portfolio with metrology and inspection capabilities. We are now uniting materials innovation and process control expertise under one roof. Our strengths – ranging from organic synthesis to our wealth of knowledge in device optics and physics – are essential to utilizing new business opportunities in the field of optoelectronic technologies, such as in augmented reality, virtual reality and mixed reality, as well as metrology and inspection. Furthermore, the strongly rising performance demands in AI chips are driving heterogeneous integration with optical interconnects (co-packaged optics), delivering efficiency and high-bandwidth data transfer beyond the limits of traditional electrical wiring. Additionally, the further development of our businesses with liquid crystals and materials for organic light-emitting diodes remains an important part of our Optronics portfolio and will open up new opportunities.
In our view, we are well prepared for very long-term trends in the industry. One example is the fusion of semiconductor technology and biotechnology emerging in areas such as neuromorphic chips and lab-on-a-chip and organ-on-a-chip devices, with biological computing, utilizing living organisms as a biological computer, as a significant objective. We believe that a multidisciplinary approach to science will drive the next wave of human progress; this is often termed “bioconvergence” because it leverages synergies across digital and material science as well as biotechnology and healthcare.
With the divestment of our Surface Solutions business unit, which was completed in 2025, we have sharpened our focus on the electronics industry in order to play an even more important role within the semiconductor ecosystem – we are now a pure-play electronics business.
* The contents of this chapter or section are voluntary and therefore not audited. However, our auditor has read the text critically.