Investors

An investment in Symrise is an investment in industry-leading growth and sustainable success

Since our 2006 IPO, we’ve steadily cemented our position at the forefront of the flavor and fragrance world, while multiplying our shareholders’ return.

Our continual success is defined by industry-leading growth and a comprehensive portfolio beyond traditional flavor and fragrance, underpinned by a commitment to backward integration and sustainability. Today, we employ more than 11,000 people and operate more than 100 production sites across the world.

We hold market-leading positions in a number of segments – from baby and pet food to fragrance ingredients, menthol and oral care. Our overall global market share amounts to 12%.

Symrise as it’s known today was founded in 2003, when the former Bayer subsidiary, Haarmann & Reimer, merged with the family-owned Dragoco. The historic roots of our business however date back to 1874, when the founders of Haarman & Reimer discovered how to produce nature-identical vanillin from coniferous trees. Their innovation kick-started a global industry, which continues to inspire our approach today.

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Capital Market Day 2024, Holzminden (Germany)

Six reasons to invest in Symrise

1. We operate in an attractive industry geared towards defensive end-consumer markets

4. Our competitive edge is led by a cross-divisional networking and research engine, committed to innovation

2. Our strongly balanced portfolio encompasses a global range of products, businesses, regions and customer groups

5. We’re increasingly securing backward integration across our supply chain, in service of the growing demand for naturals

3. Our strategy focuses on industry-leading growth that maintains high profitability levels

6. We’re expanding into adjacent high-growth areas beyond traditional flavor and fragrance

1. An attractive industry

As the size and spending power of consumers around the world continues to increase, manufacturers of food & beverages, perfume and cosmetics – our clients – see an increasing demand for their products

These are products that fulfill the basic, daily needs of people all over the world, and our ingredients and solutions are at their core. We estimate that on average, people interact with our ingredients 20-30 times in just a single day.  The demand for our ingredients is constant and ever-growing, both in mature and emerging markets.

Beyond the basic need to eat and drink, new consumption patterns and trends fuel a growing desire for our increasingly diverse solutions. Whether responding to the trend for healthy, natural ingredients or the growing demand for sustainable, transparently-sourced raw materials, our core offering is extremely resilient to change in our individual clients’ needs.

What’s more, the cost vs. value ratio of our ingredients is extremely positive. The percentage cost of our flavor or fragrance ingredients is extremely low, yet as the key buying criteria for food, beverages and fine fragrances its value is extremely high.

The global flavor and fragrance marketThe advantage of being a leading player

The global flavor and fragrance market

We’re active in many different markets around the world. We create solutions for traditional flavor and fragrance markets, with a portfolio that encompasses other aligned areas, such as cosmetic ingredients, probiotics and pet food.

€40.0 billion *

Total value of the global market we’re active in

* AFF market in 2023

500

Approximate number of companies across the relevant market

>67 %

Market share of the top four players, of which we are one

12 %

Our market share

The advantage of being a leading player

As one of the top four companies in our market, we benefit from high barriers to entry.

Core list system
Multinationals tend to work with a pre-defined set of three to five suppliers. As one of those suppliers, we have exclusive access to new product briefings and pitches, making it difficult for other competitors to gain access.

Supply chain and sustainability
Clients also increasingly expect suppliers to ensure batch traceability of their products and act on resource scarcity and other global challenges.

Regulation
Increasing regulation requires substantial resources and capabilities, making it harder for small players to get a foot on the ground.

Global footprint
Our global presence is crucial for capitalizing on local preferences and trends. This helps to ensure short delivery times and routes, manage backward integration and meet specific client needs.

Complexity
It takes an advanced, well-established organization to manage the complexity of 10,000 raw materials, 30,000 products and over 150 sales markets.
 

Speed, innovation and agility
Continuously decreasing product life cycles, ever faster challenging consumer habits and the surge of new competitors require our clients to become more agile – and as a result so must we.

2. A strongly balanced portfolio

Our robust business is supported by a broad and balanced portfolio that spans products, businesses, regions and customer groups

Product diversityBusiness diversityRegional diversityClient diversity

Product diversity

Our 30,000 products are made from 10,000 raw materials, and can be found in the consumer products you use every day – on average, they’re interacted with 20-30 times per day.

Business diversity

In April 2021, we split our organization into two autonomous and concurrently interconnected segments: Taste, Nutrition & Health as well as Scent & Care.

Symrise organizational structure

Regional diversity

As consumers in emerging markets wield increasing spending power, it is vital to be able to respond to demands that might differ from those found in more mature markets. We have a historically strong and growing presence in these regions.

100+

sites worldwide, in over 40 countries

4

regional headquarters

150+

sales markets

Our global footprint allows us to successfully address changes in markets and consumers around the world

Client diversity

Our 6,000 clients include family-owned businesses, regional challengers, discount/private label operators, new brands and online businesses as well as global players. One third are local, one third regional and one-third are multinationals. No one client accounts for more than 5% of our revenue. 

3. A strategy of industry-leading growth at high profitability levels

Our three-pillar strategy of Growth, Portfolio and Efficiency drives our ability to outgrow our market while maintaining high profitability - a key strategy since 2012. We’re on course to achieve our target of 5-7% growth with an EBITDA margin of 20-23%.

GrowthEfficiencyPortfolio

Growth

Our CapEx guidance of 4-5% of annual sales ensures that we keep on delivering above-market growth in the future.

We also focus on the local and regional customers that already account for two-thirds of our sales – they’re the fastest growing and most agile. We compound this with our comprehensive research and technology capabilities.
 

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  • Corporate Report 2022
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Efficiency

Protecting our profitability is essential to our continued success. A major factor in achieving this is our commitment to new efficiency measures – that’s why we’re continuously improving our cost base.

We restructured our fragrance division, enabling streamlined innovation.

We have developed technologies to drive green chemistry faster.

We work together with our clients on end-to-end supply chain solutions that enable them to improve their efficiency.

Portfolio

We were ahead of the curve when it came to strategic acquisitions that expand our portfolio into new high-growth areas, and we continue to target new opportunities that sit adjacent to our core business.

We maximise the potential of our unique portfolio by promoting innovative, cross-divisional networking that encompasses the entirety of our business.  

Timeline of acquisitions 2023

4. A cross-divisional networking and research engine

Innovation drives our growth

Our teams are breaking down the traditional barriers between flavor and fragrance in their quest to pioneer a new generation of game-changing solutions

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Beauty+

Our cosmetics and fragrance teams come together under the Beauty+ banner to create highly functional ingredients that also smell and feel great.

Dog getting a bathRead more

Fragrant pets

What pets want or need does not always necessarily match the wishes of their owners. This also applies to perfumes and smells in pet care as well in beauty and home care products.

Read more

Madagascar 2.0

Our fragrance division created high quality essential oils from Madagascan vanilla, ginger and cinnamon bark drawing on the raw materials and expertise of our flavour division.

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‘Innomeat’

Experts from Diana Nutrition and Symrise unified their know-how when offering a range of different chicken products that both utilise the whole chicken and remain committed to using only natural materials.

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All about the berries

Diana Food produces high-quality standardized cranberry extracts and powders that are said to provide cell protection as antioxidants and to help preventing urinary tract and bladder infections.

Read more

Fine fish food

Fish is popular, and stocks are dwindling. As an alternative to wild-caught fish, more and more of the animals in the market are from aquaculture. Diana Aqua is developing products that make their feed particularly digestible, appealing and nutritious.

Our extensive expertise doesn’t just involve cross-divisional networking – it also includes a core research engine that brings together some of the best minds from across academia and the wider industry

We come together to influence everything from product development to marketing strategy and regulatory considerations. This outside-of-the-box thinking ultimately enables us to deliver full solutions for our clients that go beyond taste and smell.

As these recent success stories show, our innovation is led by consumer trends, customer satisfaction and a commitment to sustainability.

Stustainability is key for our growth strategy and play a major role in everything we do.
Explore more here.

5. Backward integration

Backward integration means increasing our control of the various supply chains that are crucial to our business. As we operate in over 40 countries and work with 5,000+ suppliers around the world, this is vital to our long-term, sustainable success.

In short-term cycles, the price and availability of our natural raw materials can be impacted by circumstances beyond our control: flash-flooding and socio-political unrest are just two examples.

Strong, backwardly-integrated relationships with our suppliers are key to overcoming these challenges. They help us to minimize resource use and ensure a sustainable supply of the high-quality materials our customers demand – both in the short and long-term.

Until 2025 100% of our main suppliers (90% of procurement volume) assessed according sustainability criteria.

Explore some of our successes in backward integration

Click on the map pins to read more about our sustainable sourcing activities and where we source some of our strategic raw materials such as bananas, bergamot, beetroot and vanilla.

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6. A vision beyond traditional flavor and fragrance

Our strategy for non-traditional flavor and fragrance markets is reflected in our recent acquisitions

Approximately two-thirds of our business is devoted to traditional markets, while the remaining third looks to new markets to boost our growth.

For example, between 2012 and 2016 we have increased our stake to become majority shareholders in the pioneering Swedish probiotics company, Probi.

Our acquisition of Diana Group included a move into pet food, a market in which we have been advancing the use of innovative pet taste-testing and the big data insights of pet social media.

With the acquisition of ADF/IDF, Symrise leverages its leadership position in pet food, extending its palatability know-how towards the Premium Nutrition segment. The ADF/IDF’s brand IsoNova offers pet food solutions using egg protein specialties. It develops animal health, functional, and nutritional products. Thereby, Symrise becomes a unique player for pet food and nutrition. With ADF/IDF`s expertise in clean label chicken and egg-based nutrition ingredients Symrise will form a fully integrated supplier of protein specialty ingredients. Customers will benefit from a highly efficient supply chain and natural quality products.

Product wheel

Where we are, where we’re heading

2006 - today: over a decade of success

In 2006 we traded for the first time on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, becoming the largest IPO in Europe that year

Since our IPO, we can look back on steady, profitable growth above the market average. 

Having promptly established ourselves as a leading company in the industry over the past years, our goal can only be to consolidate and expand this position. We want to achieve this not by being hasty, but instead by implementing a well thought out and, more importantly, sustainable strategy.Dr. Jean-Yves Parisot, Chief Executive Officer

On track to hit our 2025 goals

In January 2019 we announced our new long-term targets until 2025 for the first time at our Investors' Day in Charleston, South Carolina, USA. We aim to increase our sales from € 5.5 to 6 billion. This target is supposed to be achieved with an average annual organic sales growth rate (CAGR) of 5 to 7 % and strategic acquisitions. During that period, profitability is planned to be further increased at a high level. From 2020 onward, we also intend to generate an EBITDA margin within the target corridor of 20 to 23 %. At the same time, we will remain fully committed to our proven strategy.

CAGR 5-7%

2012-2025 annual organic sales growth target
(2022: 11.4%)

20-23%*

annual EBITDA margin target since 2020
(2023: 19.1%)
* Without impairment of the associated company Swedencare

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Taste, Nutrition & Health

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Sustainable sourcing