Message from the CEO
I find myself saying it once again, what a year it has been. In my 35 years in the industry, I have never seen anything like the market volatility we have been and are still experiencing. Despite this, 2022 was a record year for Corbion in terms of growth and profitability, and we made significant progress in delivering our Advance 2025 strategy.
We gained market share and raised organic sales growth substantially, grew adjusted EBITDA, invested in our organization and production capacity, achieved EBITDA break-even in our algae-based omega-3 business, and increased the ambition level of our carbon footprint reduction targets in line with 1.5°C. We adapted to unprecedented cost inflation and supply chain disruptions, implementing a disciplined combination of price increases, mix improvements, and improvements in operational efficiency. In our core business, product mix improvements more than offset the lower volumes, which attests to the strength of our differentiated portfolio.
In Sustainable Food Solutions, our adaptability and agility helped differentiate Corbion from the competition, as supply chain disruptions, raw material shortages, pricing volatility, and labor scarcity continued to burden businesses throughout the value chain. Our ability to develop new solutions and technologies helped alleviate the impact of these market dynamics on our customers. In bakery, we quickly helped customers reformulate when breakdowns occurred within their supply chains, due to logistical disruptions, global conflicts, or the impact of climate change on agricultural crops.
Today, Corbion’s comprehensive approach to preservation goes beyond optimizing food safety and shelf life. Our preservation portfolio encompasses many other factors important to consumers and producers such as taste, texture, color, yield, waste reduction, and sustainability, not only in meat and poultry products, but also in the plant-based meat alternatives segment, which continues to grow and innovate at a steady pace. In 2022, we continued to strongly invest in our capabilities by expanding consumer insights, expanding our capacity for producing natural ferments at our Peoria, US plant, and extending our presence in Asia-Pacific with a newly-opened Customer Support and Innovation Center in Singapore.
This year, Corbion introduced the first-ever predictive modeling tool designed to accurately forecast the success rate of specific mold inhibition solutions in baked goods, allowing customers to save both time and money in product development, and improving their speed to market.
In Lactic Acid & Specialties, we continue to see strong, pandemic-fueled product development in hygiene and cleaning, in addition to product reformulation by brand owners favoring safer, more natural ingredients. Our solutions for the semiconductor industry maintained their upward trajectory as growth in data processing, connectivity, and Internet-of-Things continues to drive demand for chips and memory. In 2022, the agrochemicals market benefitted from high crop prices, which drives demand for measures that support crop yield and production, such as environmentally-friendly crop protection. In the orthopedic segment of the healthcare market, our business continued its recovery from the impact of COVID-19 as elective surgeries returned. CM Biomaterials, our joint venture with the French company MedinCell, focusing on a cost-effective new drug delivery methodology, continued to develop its pipeline, and the JV’s lead partner is expecting to receive FDA approval and subsequently launch of their first product by mid-2023.
TotalEnergies and Corbion remain confident in the outlook for PLA and are committed to growing the PLA business, despite mid-term setbacks in 2022 caused by coronavirus-related lockdowns in China and the high-energy and transport costs felt by customers.
After achieving EBITDA break-even in our algae business in June 2022, we believed the time had come to carve out Algae Ingredients from the Incubator to establish a separate business unit. Our commercial milestone followed a major R&D breakthrough that improved our production yield, which led to significant customer adoption in aquaculture. We expanded into new markets in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, and beyond aquaculture into new categories such as pet nutrition. We have full confidence in the growth opportunity and profitability potential for this business unit, which will focus initially on our algae-based omega-3 offerings.
Given our core purpose to Preserve What Matters, sustainability continues to be an essential component in all our decision-making. Our sustainability ambitions begin with preserving the health and safety of our people and contractors. During 2022, Corbion continued its Safety Excellence Journey with the introduction of new behavior-based safety initiatives at five locations, giving greater focus to site leadership capabilities and routines, and increased employee involvement in driving risk reduction.
We believe it is imperative that we continue looking for ways to reduce the environmental impact of our businesses; the climate crisis poses a threat to virtually every aspect of civilization, our environment, and the global economy. We are ahead of schedule in pursuing our initial emission reduction targets, while still discovering more opportunities to do even better. When it comes to reducing the impact of climate change, there is no such thing as overachieving. We are actively pursuing more aggressive emission reduction targets which have been validated in 2022 by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), which is driving ambitious climate action in the private sector. Our new reduction goals align with the ambition to limit average global temperature rise to 1.5°C.
Looking back on 2022, we can be proud of the way Corbion delivered on expectations despite challenging conditions, all the while standing by our purpose and our values, never compromising on safety, raising the bar on sustainability, creating value for our customers, and maintaining a high level of care for our employees. I look forward to continuing our Advance 2025 journey and strengthening our commitment to preserving what matters. On behalf of my colleagues, I want to express our gratitude to you – our employees, customers, suppliers, partners, and shareholders – for continuing to put your trust in Corbion.
On behalf of the Executive Committee
Olivier Rigaud
