Growing Together

Ms. Claas-Mühlhäuser, why does CLAAS have a new mission statement?

Claas-Mühlhäuser CLAAS has been a successful family-owned company for over 100 years: We have developed new technologies, conquered new markets, and become much more international. A fitting guiding principle used by my father not only hangs in many of our offices, but also shapes our actions: “If you want to be a leader, you must keep running.” If you are “running”, you should know where you are running to. When we were redrawing our strategic map, we found that many of our assumptions and conclusions were not fundamentally new. We have now added more detail to them and launched a strategic plan with defined projects. We have also worked with a large number of stakeholders to reposition our brand. With our vision, our mission, and our values, we now have a new answer that we are communicating internally and externally to a key question: What does CLAAS stand for?

Why are you using a grain plant to illustrate your mission statement?

Böck  A grain plant consists of many important individual parts – like our strategy. It is only if these work perfectly together that the whole will be greater than the sum of its parts. All the components build on each other, are interconnected, and feed one another. Only as a whole and with strong roots can the plant grow and create new growth. This is precisely what our customers expect from the plants in their fields – and from us. And this is what we want to stand for as a company and as a brand: growing together.

What strategic goals and initiatives have you derived from this?

Böck We want to remain an independent family-owned company. That is not a given. We are therefore focusing even more strongly on the satisfaction of our customers and are linking that to specific growth and earnings targets. In line with this, we have launched six strategic programs whose ambitious goals we want to achieve by 2025. These include growth in our tractor business as well as in the aftersales area. We are significantly expanding the harvesting technology business in our growth markets, while here in Europe our priority is to remain the un­disputed number one. This will require a further technology push, which we are now initiating with the “Smart Farming – Automation – New Technologies” program. We have already mentioned our customers: We share with them a passion for ­agriculture and put them at the center of all our work. We aim to help them achieve their goals in a sustainable manner so that they can be among the best in their field.

Does it make a difference re-positioning CLAAS as a family-owned company?

Claas-Mühlhäuser Yes, certainly. We think long-term, act as a team, and steadfastly pursue our goals – whether they ­relate to new technologies, growth in the tractor business, or expansion in Russia and North America. We enter into long-term relationships and focus not only on the here and now. We think in terms of generations – generations of CLAAS employees and generations of our customers.

Growing together.

This is what we want to stand for as a company and as a brand: An overview of our mission statement.