Markets & Outlook

New concepts are required!
The challenges of the 21st century can only be faced with solutions from the 21st century. These solutions require, however, completely new approaches which unfortunately are only slowly prevailing with those responsible. When we went onto the stock exchange in January 2009 there was a lot of talk in a lot of places of “sustainability”, but visible signs of progress are yet to be seen. So much (both good and bad) has occurred in the world in the meantime that even the most conservative of economists are finding it difficult to stick to the “old way of thinking” – and this is only the very beginning.

Business administration-teaching manuals of days gone by, for example, neglect the fact that global climate change is already today leading to social and political upheavals of unprecedented dimensions. CO² is a ENEMY of mankind and it is above all important that it should disappear from our thought patterns, for more environmentally conscious alternatives for heating, generating electricity and ensuring individual mobility have been available for a long time now.

Another fact that also evades economical perspectives is that clean drinking water, despite definition of the basic human right to it, is still denied to more than one thousand million human beings. Millions of children world-wide die from the consequence of infectious diseases. The consequence is not “growth” but a step backwards.

One thing is certain: boundless growth is impossible. Growth for growth’s sake is an irrational obsession, which cannot be sustained in the long term.

Let there be no mistake: you are indeed on the home page of a company that purposefully uses investments for economic progression. The difference is that we call it “DEVELOPMENT”!

A young human being grows every day, but this process comes to a halt after adolescence for a good reason. He nevertheless continues to DEVELOP after this time. Are people who are no longer growing, less successful because of that? On the contrary, successful life only begins then.

Ecological systems are components of a superordinated apparatus, the biosphere. In this, growth cannot be infinite, but development surely can be. Here it is a matter of finding ideal solutions that do indeed make not purely quantitative expansion but rather qualitative progression possible. Is it not the case that small investments in regionally limited measures are today already a much more effective instrument in threshold countries?

As a company that is active on the open market, we are of course also required to grow but we also have good reasons for doing just that: the “building sites” upon which we are working have enormous potential!