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Customers—Approach
We are sharpening our focus and picking up our pace in creating profitable and sustainable growth—derived from both customer-centered “organic” initiatives and strategic “inorganic” acquisitions—by expanding business with our existing customers and adding new ones, particularly in fast-growing global markets.
Our goal is to grow the enterprise via our non-primary aluminum businesses at a rate significantly exceeding the natural growth rates of the markets in which we choose to participate. To consistently achieve this, we work closely with customers to better understand their needs. We then fuse our technology, expertise, and creativity into engineered solutions that solve their problems or help them create new opportunities. These solutions allow our customers to differentiate themselves and capture above-market growth as well.
We also support our widespread commercial organizations that are critical to our businesses, which have profit and loss accountability in our decentralized structure.
While this decentralized structure gives us broad flexibility and agility in serving unique markets and customers, one ongoing dilemma is that it can unintentionally present organizational barriers to overall success. These barriers restrict the sharing and leveraging of data, intellectual capital, products, and the easy cooperation that breeds cross-business solutions.
In response, our diverse and multi-disciplined Growth & Market Strategy Team has adopted architecture and processes 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 “white space,” where new business opportunities that leverage our skills, market position, and financial strength reside.
Our long history has proved that we can, and must, effectively adapt to changes in our business environment. One such change clearly underway is an increased attention to sustainability. We see sustainability in hard business terms—sustainable business practices, environmental astuteness, and social responsibility have the potential to deliver benefits to our shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers and the communities in which we operate.
We 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.
In the United Kingdom, for example, our European Wheel Products Group buys back used aluminum wheels when customers buy new ones through a program called Value for Life. Customers get new wheels that drive fuel savings and reduce emissions while also supporting the recycling of aluminum.
Working with a global oil drilling contractor to develop aluminum rig risers, our technical experts improved the strength and corrosion resistance of aluminum riser tube. This allowed our customer to explore in significantly deeper water with higher payload. By leveraging enhanced directional drilling, new aluminum drill strings (columns of pipe) coming to market in 2008 will allow oil extraction to occur with fewer surface entry points—a plus for the
environment.
Alcoa Rigid Packaging is collaborating with other U.S. can sheet and can makers to refresh a previously commissioned life cycle inventory study of the North American aluminum beverage can. Updated data will be used by contributors to evaluate process changes and complete an environmental scorecard developed by Wal-Mart.
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