Hello Stefan, Season’s Greetings to you! What are the first things that come to your mind when you hear the words: success, Christmas, RHI Magnesita?
Season’s greetings to you too and to all our colleagues, customers, investors and partners. To me success is safety, resilience, and progress; Christmas is about community of people, gratitude – from a business perspective all these success and Christmas elements come together in RHI Magnesita: global, responsible leadership.
If you would like to host a Christmas holiday party for the whole of RHIM, what would be the theme?
The theme I would choose this year is ‘Building the Future Together Now,’ a concept that not only celebrates our past achievements but looks forward with optimism and purpose. This theme embodies a shared vision—a commitment to working together toward a future shaped by digitalization, delivering progress, cleaner environment and meticulous execution. It would highlight a kind of collaboration, where every contribution matters and strengthens our collective success. It underscores our joint commitment to safety as a cornerstone of everything we do, ensuring the well-being of our people and communities. It would place a strong focus on sustainability, reminding us of our responsibility to protect and preserve resources for generations to come.
If you could give your team one superpower for the new year, what would it be and how would it help the company?
If I could grant them a superpower, it would be the gift of fast decision making: the world has become so uncertain, that the courage to take decisions with some uncertainty has become key. Combined with the ability to anticipate and adapt to changes as they occur with again a swift decision. This would empower us to stay ahead of external challenges and continue to lead the industry with confidence.
How would you sum up the year 2024 for RHIM in one sentence?
2024 was a year of great hope which descended to be one of the most challenging in decades: the continued market downturn, the uncertain geo-politics, and mounting levels of bureaucracy are testing our agility and resilience. We are challenged to find innovative ways to sustain our business in order to successfully create value for all our stakeholders.
How has the global economic landscape influenced the company’s strategic decisions this year?
Profoundly! Key factors include the ongoing demand downturn, geopolitical disruptions, increasing trade barriers and structural shifts in major economies. These, together with a prolonged industrial stagnation, rising protectionism, the decline in traditional supply chains and structurally rising, but still volatile, raw material and sea freight cost have compelled us to rethink. For instance, the structural transformation in China from a supply and volume – driven to a demand, quality & value – driven economy has created short term imbalances in global trade, further complicating the business environment. Western economies are experiencing an industrial recession due to reduced demand in construction and transport sectors, while even previously optimistic regions like India and the Middle East are witnessing short-term weaknesses. In response RHIM has emphasised adaptability, discipline, and innovation. Recognizing overcapacity as a pressing issue, RHI Magnesita has prioritized value-addition strategies, focused on sustainability, and pursued acquisitions. This approach reflects a strategic adaptation to mitigate the uncertainties of a transformed global economy.
According to you, what were the main achievements of RHI Magnesita in 2024?
Despite our own internal subjective disappointment with the year, objectively we’ve continued to demonstrate operational and financial resilience through the dedication and hard work of our teams. As the global leader in heat management, we have not stood still but are using this period to prepare for the future. When our customers choose RHI Magnesita, they choose high performance products and services for their applications, a collaborative relationship based on the true spirit of partnership, a team of people upholding commitment to safety and continuous improvement of their production, and a company that is actively pursuing low-carbon and circularity initiatives to make our planet sustainable. These principles are at the core of our new holistic solution contract named 4PRO. Internally, we have made huge progress in upgrading our global digital architecture and connected delivery platform: RHIM is investing over €100m until 2027 to re-build our global end-to-end value chain for a step- change in improving our service to our customers.
The safety and well-being of our people continued to be our top value. This year we have started to fundamentally transform our safety culture in order to achieve zero accidents in all of RHIM’s production plants and at all of our operations at customer sites. Furthermore, with almost €1m of personal donations as a starting fund, RHIM’s employees & Board of Directors have instituted RHI Magnesita HELP – an independent non-profit association that offers fast, unbureaucratic support for persons and their families around the world who have been affected by work-related accidents. The scope includes RHI Magnesita, its operating communities, its business partners, contractors, customers, and suppliers.
The refractory industry is by nature a ‘hard-to-abate’ industry, but we are committed to seeking new ways to eliminate CO2 emissions from our operations and our global supply chain in the long term. Since 2018, we’ve delivered positive change: Ongoing investments in CO2 emissions avoidance and Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage has resulted in 1.6 Mt CO2 emissions savings since 2018 (more than 20% of our scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions). We have made significant investments in recycling: 13.2% of the raw materials we now use globally comes from our customers « spent refractories ». We aim to take this to 15% by the end of next year and to 20% in 2030. This requires ongoing technology development to uphold the best refractory performance in the world. We are looking forward to a “circular” collaboration with all of our business partners. Our customers have validated RHIM’s sustainability leadership in the industry during 2024 by awarding us several very large green steel projects, for Direct Reduction, Open Bath, Electric Arc, and Basic Oxygen furnaces, all essential for the large-scale adoption of green steel production globally.
Customers have also shown strong satisfaction with the ongoing improvements in the offering, as evidenced by record-high net promoter scores and PIFOT (Produced in Full and On Time) metrics, which reached new peaks in Q3.
During 2024, we continued to seamlessly integrate the people, products, and processes of 9 companies that we’ve acquired in last 3 years, creating synergies and driving value for all our stakeholders. Our acquisition strategy continues with the pending acquisition of Resco Group (enterprise value of up to $430 million), with anticipated completion in Q1 2025.
In 2024, we embarked on a journey to drive better service delivery for customers and create more career opportunities for our employees working in shared services. We have transitioned most of our global shared services operations to Capgemini, a global leader in process design, digital transformation, and shared service operations. Capgemini will play a key role in supporting the implementation of our new ERP system, which is expected to be delivered between mid-2025 and mid-2027. Many thanks to our colleagues in the shared service centres for their past and future dedication and performance.
Year after year, RHIM’s Global Trainee Program is becoming attractive to more and more people. This year, we saw a record number of applicants, and 20 trainees joined RHIM, most of them women. We are thrilled that these young and talented individuals have chosen us as the starting point for their professional careers.
What goals are on your vision board for yourself and the company for next year?
I would like to see every aspect of RHIM become much safer. For this it would be crucial for everyone at RHIM to play an active part in the safety culture transformation. After that, I would further like to see us strengthening our core culture values to be more customer focussed and deliver across our growing footprint everywhere.
I wish that RHIM accelerates the business transformation driven by the digital transformation. This will make us future ready so that we can lead the industry through the 21st century. This requires a further improvement of operational excellence and supply chain delivery performance and the optimisation of our “administrative factory”.
We will continue to focus on disciplined growth through partnerships and acquisitions. The integration of products, processes and especially people of the acquired business will continue be a clear priority. This also allows us to explore further optimisation of our production networks to improve customer experience, adapt to the changing global market environment and of course to deliver shareholder value.
We will continue to build industry opinion and administrative policy support for decarbonizing the refractory value chain, especially the raw materials, together with our suppliers, and invest on new technologies for carbon capture and utilization and recycling for making positive impact on emission control.
Making our industry more attractive for young talent worldwide, particularly women must continue. Diversification of our talents and leaders is essential for sustained performance growth for a global company that we are now.
Personally, I remain committed in the new year to fostering a culture of openness, collaboration and personal accountability to deliver. I hope I can inspire all of RHIM’s employees to achieve these goals, ensuring together that we leave a positive impact.
