Evonik Industries

I am responsible for strategy in our personal care business and for M&A in that sector also.

We look at our business in the same way that our customers do, so we have ‘leave-on’ and ‘rinse-off’ basically, plus we have a special area of active ingredients.

We operate on a technical and functional level to support our customers in formulating their products in hair care, skin care, face care. The only areas we do not supply ingredients for are styling and colour cosmetics.

With a lot of our key accounts we don’t know exactly where they are using our ingredients, so GNPD helps us in finding out which formulations they appear in, and in which countries those products are being sold.

We can search for the specific name and then we know for sure that is in the end product and we can also screen by the effects those products are designed to achieve. It gives us a lot of extremely valuable information on how our ingredients are used in products with specific claims.

That is critical for us because many of our customers change their formulations and launch new products all the time.

BPC and Mintel reports then give us the additional trend information that is important to us also. We are a global company but we cannot look at each country in the detail that Mintel can.

We have people all over the world but they are sales people, not analysts, so the market overview they can get from Mintel is very helpful because it makes it easier to see where beauty and personal care is going.

We have been a Mintel client for around 10 years now and we use these services in our personal care business.

GNPD is the product we use most but we now also have access to BPC and reports, and maybe twice a year we request some specific analysis of a particular area we are interested in.

New markets such as China coming on stream offer opportunities for us but challenges also, particularly around the registration of ingredients.

Traceability of ingredients is also becoming more important as consumers want to know more and more about where the products they buy are coming from.

That creates a challenge of sustainability, one we are responding to by sourcing more natural ingredients for use in personal care products.