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Customers—Approach
Following the deterioration of worldwide economic conditions in 2008, it became increasingly critical that we sharpen our focus more precisely as we pursue the most promising opportunities to create profitable and sustainable growth. We prize those opportunities derived from customer-connected organic initiatives and from strategic inorganic acquisitions that allow us to selectively expand business at existing customers and add new customers.
Our goal remains to grow the enterprise via our non-primary aluminum businesses at a rate significantly above the natural growth rates of the markets in which we choose to participate. To achieve this consistently, we work closely with customers to better understand their needs and anticipate future ones. We then fuse our creativity, expertise, and technology into engineered solutions that solve their problems or help them create new opportunities. Our expectation is that these solutions allow our customers to differentiate themselves and capture above-market growth as well.
It is critical to support our globally dispersed commercial organizations, which have profit and loss accountability in our decentralized structure. While this decentralized structure gives us a high degree of agility in serving unique markets and customers, one ongoing dilemma is that it can unintentionally present organizational barriers to overall success. These barriers can restrict the sharing and leveraging of data, intellectual capital, products, and the easy cooperation that breeds cross-business solutions. In other words, there is a risk that a significant Alcoa advantage derived from exploiting our unique interconnectedness could be diluted or even lost without proper awareness and proactive management.
In response, our diverse and multi-disciplined Growth & Market Strategy Team has adopted architecture, processes, and an entrepreneurial outlook to provide a structured approach to marketing across our global operations. Our efforts are especially tuned to identifying and quantifying profitable adjacencies to existing businesses, and to uncovering and incubating “white space,” where new business opportunities that leverage our unique skills, market position, production assets, and financial strength reside.
Our long history has proved that we can, and must, effectively adapt to and better foresee changes in our business environment. One such movement clearly underway and demonstrably growing is the push for sustainability. We see sustainability in hard business terms. A concentration on sustainable business practices, environmental astuteness, and social responsibility has the potential to deliver benefits to our shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers and the communities in which we operate.
We continue to work with our customers to help them integrate sustainable business practices into their products and services, which follows on our commitment to ensure safe and sustainable practices in our operations and products.
Alcoa’s Oil & Gas Market Development Team evolved into a new Alcoa business unit in late 2008. Working closely with top tier producers and oil and gas drilling services companies, this business is developing and marketing strong, lightweight, corrosion-resistant aluminum drilling risers, drill tube assemblies, whipstocks, and other critical parts that allow customers to explore in significantly deeper water and yield higher payloads. By leveraging enhanced directional drilling, new aluminum drill strings will enable oil extraction to occur via fewer surface entry points—a plus for the environment.
Alcoa Rigid Packaging, along with other U.S. can sheet and can makers, completed an updated lifecycle inventory of the North American aluminum beverage can. New data are being used to evaluate and enact process changes, complete environmental scorecards like those in use at Wal-Mart and other retailers, and explore new opportunities around sustainable certification of aluminum packaging, including popular new aluminum bottles. We expect to extend lifecycle analysis at the product-line level to our other strategic markets in 2009.
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