中欧管理论坛综述(英文版)

中欧管理论坛 Investor Relations (Excerpts from the speech. Content rights reserved by the speaker and CEIBS. Use of the content must be with the prior approval from CEIBS.)   Michael Jacobi (Biography) CFO of Ciba Specialty Chemicals Nov. 29, 2002 Good afternoon. I am pleased to be with you. Who here knows Ciba? I would like to very quickly talk a little about Ciba and talk about investor relations. As CFO of our company, I spend one third of my time on investor relations. Let me give you a piece of advice that we use for investors. I'll tell you: Who is Ciba? What is investor relations? What does it mean, really? Who are our customers? How do we meet them? What is that thing called investor relations? And some investor relations dos and don'ts. We are Ciba Specialty Chemicals. We produce so-called specialty chemicals. It's something you do not find in shops. You cannot find us. We work primarily on things that change the colour, performance or look and feel of certain products you buy. You will always find us in small ingredients in something bigger. It's like spices in food. We are not spices in food, but ingredients in other products. These are the segments, the business areas that we are in. I'll give you an example of our products as we go along. Overall, the company has about $5 billion US dollars in sales. We are in Switzerland. That is why we talk about Swiss francs. Our headquarters is in Basel, Switzerland. Our four segments we're in are about the same size, so it is a very balanced portfolio and we have very strong market positions. That's one of the good things when you're talking about investor relations. We are a large company, a billion-dollar industry, and we have very strong segments and leading positions. It's much easier to explain your company and investor relations this way than if you come in and say, "We are a small company and we don't particularly define the market." What are our products? One is plastic additives. All these core businesses are about $1.5 billion US Dollars in size. They are very large companies that are number one in the market world-wide. They are spread all over the world, obviously also in China. Being a European-based company, for us, the biggest market is the United States. The second biggest is Germany. The third biggest market is China. For us, China is very important in terms of presence. We have a very large presence here. We have a lot of factories, several in Shanghai and Qingdao. It's really a very important market. What do we produce here? You have plastic, polyethylene. You can't use polyethylene-plastic bags and wrapping-anymore without using additives that stabilise against light. Otherwise it falls apart. In order to stabilise it, we produce these additives for the plastic industry. We produce them here, among others, in Shanghai. It's one of our most recent plants, right here in Pudong. If you want to see the plant, we'd be happy to show you around. Just get in touch with us. It's a very nice plant, definitely an expensive plant. We also make coating effects. These are very exciting things. Where do you find us? You find us basically on cars. If anyone has a red car. Red cars, they used to turn kind of brownish. The new cars don't anymore and that's because they use something that comes from our company. The red colour comes from us. You also find this with CDRs. It's an interesting example. CDRs, recordable CDs, if you look from the side, you see some green shade. It's usually silvery or gold, then a green shade. That is a pigment. We make that pigment. We have a modest market share. It's the registration on which the laser burns. It registers the information on the colour, the pigment. The pigment comes from us, primarily sold in Taiwan. These are typical things we have here. Alessi, typical kitchenware in Europe. These colours all come from us. We make modern paper treatment products, which go into paper production. I see some of you have white paper. The additive that makes the paper look white, two-thirds world-wide comes from us. In water treatment, cleaning water, we are quite strong. In oil trimming-separating the oil and water-the chemicals used in the extraction industry are chemicals we produce. We are not so large, but still quite common in the industry. Textile chemicals, dyes and special effects for textiles. We are the world's number one producer of chemicals for the textile industry. All the colours come from us. By the way, in the typical business suit, there are 60 chemicals in a suit. Another thing that comes from us is all kinds of special effects for the fashion industry. We have one product, to protect clothes. You can spill beer and food and anything on clothes and it doesn't get dirty. This is a product we produce and sell in the industry. This is, for us, an important thing for you to see us, coming into these industries. Last but not least is home and personal care. Whiteners for the detergents to cle