Interview with Jahangir Doongaji and Christoph Loos
| Date | Location |
| February 6, 2024 | Liechtenstein, Schaan |
Hear from CEO Jahangir Doongaji and Chairman of the Board of Directors Christoph Loos how Hilti managed this year’s challenges and what’s in store for 2024.
Innovative new products and solutions, a significant acquisition, strong market share growth and a new corporate strategy – all of that in a challenging environment – 2023 was definitely an exciting year for the Hilti Group. We would like to take a closer look at the highlights and challenges the company faced during what was an eventful year for all of us.
Kristina Rancic, Interviewer:
When we look back at 2023, it’s safe to say that it was a year full of significant challenges. Two armed conflicts with political implications in many parts of the world, economic challenges with inflation and high interest rates. How did 2023 go for Hilti?
Jahangir Doongaji, CEO:
I think we can safely say that 2023 was a good year for the Hilti Group. Measured in local currencies, we grew our topline by 9 percent, and this growth was evenly distributed across the globe. In Swiss francs, however, given the strong currency effects, growth was at 2.7 percent, and that brought us to total sales of around 6.5 billion at the end of the year. Now, despite these strong currency effects, we still managed to grow our profit overproportionately, and we ended the year with 770 million Swiss francs in OPP.
Kristina Rancic, Interviewer:
Christoph, how do you assess these results in comparison to the market environment and to the performance of your competitors?
Christoph Loos, Chairman of the Board of Directors:
9 percent is good growth, and it’s even better if you compare it to the world around us. From our data, from what we see, we believe we were able to outperform all major competitors, and with that, gain market share in this difficult environment. And that’s of course encouraging. That was possible because I guess we’ve done a few things right. We also benefited from the one or the other trend. For instance, there was a normalization of the DIY-based demand after the pandemic that we weren’t affected by, because of our focus on professional customers. But I believe the biggest driver for this outperformance was clearly Nuron.
I think we can safely say that 2023 was a good year for the Hilti Group. Measured in local currencies, we grew our topline by 9 percent and this growth was evenly distributed across the globe.
Jahangir Doongaji, CEO
Kristina Rancic, Interviewer:
One important element of Lead 2030 is building a comprehensive software offering. How did Hilti progress with this topic in 2023?
Christoph Loos, Chairman of the Board of Directors:
Our ambition is to be our customers’ best partner for productivity, and that means that next to bringing products and solutions that improve on-site work, we feel that there is a big potential in helping customers to improve their business processes. And for that, you need software. We launched our asset management software ON!Track a few years ago, followed by our jobsite management software Fieldwire. And now in 2023, we were able to acquire 4PS, the market leader in the construction industry for business management solutions, and we’re very happy about that.
Jahangir Doongaji, CEO:
Going forward, we will continue to expand the portfolio, this time as a first step with a focus on making people-related topics like time and attendance management simpler and more productive. And in addition to doing that, we will continue to better integrate the different solutions that we have today.
This combination of local and global sustainability initiatives earned us again a gold rating by Ecovadis, which positioned us among the top 1 percent in our industry.
Christoph Loos, Chairman of the Board of Directors
Kristina Rancic, Interviewer:
Next to productivity, Hilti’s customer promise also includes the important topic of sustainability. What did Hilti’s sustainability journey look like in 2023?
Jahangir Doongaji, CEO:
In 2023, we reached a very important milestone by achieving carbon neutrality in our own operations. That was the first target that we had set ourselves when we embarked on our sustainability journey in 2020. We now have the ambition to take that to the next level and we have thus committed to science-based targets which require us to reduce our carbon emissions by 30 percent in the short term and reach net zero by 2050. And in order to do that, we need to integrate sustainability aspects even stronger in our product development process.
Christoph Loos, Chairman of the Board of Directors:
That’s big. And next to minimizing our ecological footprint, we continued to also encourage the social impact of our team members through our corporate volunteering program. And in addition, the great work of the Hilti Foundation continued, and this combination of local and global sustainability initiatives once again earned us a gold rating from Ecovadis, which positioned us among the top 1 percent in our industry.
Thank you very much for these valuable insights. We are curious to see how 2024 will unfold.
