Interview with Frank Heislitz

Freudenberg Performance Materials is a leading manufacturer of technical textiles and serves customers across the world. The company is active in a broad range of markets such as apparel, automotive, construction, energy, filter media, healthcare, hygiene, building interiors, shoe and leather goods as well as specialties.

As a global leading manufacturer of technical textiles for a broad range of markets, Freudenberg Performance Materials is the world leader in interlinings for the apparel industry and technical textiles for the construction industry. We also hold a leading position in most of our other markets such as carpet backings. This success is based on the company's innovation strength, broad technology platform and local presence in all our global markets.

Innovation is central to the Freudenberg Group's success. This is underlined by R&D expenditure: in 2019, the Freudenberg Group invested 34 per cent of sales into R&D.

Freudenberg Performance Materials works with the broadest technology platform in the market. Dry laid, spun laid, wet laid, melt-blown, foams, knits and webs are our base technologies, which we combine with a wide variety of coating and finishing technologies. This enables Freudenberg to precisely tailor product offerings and characteristics to specific customer needs. In addition, our customers benefit directly from Freudenberg's global footprint. With 23 production sites in 13 countries and more than 100 sales offices worldwide, we are close to our customers in all our main regional and global markets.

In terms of revenues, Freudenberg Performance Materials benefits particularly from the apparel, automotive, building interiors and construction markets, as well as from specialty applications. Market segments that embrace megatrends like the ageing society and e-mobility already have future potential for this reason alone, especially automotive and healthcare.

With our "footprint and handprint" model, Freudenberg pursues a far-reaching approach to sustainability that has an impact right down to our customers' processes. "Footprint" is how Freudenberg improves its processes and equips its plants to make production as resource-efficient as possible. "Handprint" relates to the way Freudenberg's many products and services directly enable our customers to improve the efficiency of their own products. This is where Freudenberg contributes to a positive handprint. Both footprint and handprint focus on resource efficiency with the goal of becoming more sustainable. The most important areas in this respect are materials, waste, energy, emissions, water and health.