Any entrepreneurial endeavor requires a careful consideration of opportunities and risks. Our efforts in that regard are guided by three principles:

1. Opportunities must clearly outweigh risks in every business activity.
2. All speculative transactions are prohibited.
3. Our actions must comply not only with prevailing laws, but also with ethical and moral standards.

Our risk management system is based on standardized methods and applies Group-wide. That enables us to analyze and evaluate all risks uniformly and across the Group. The resulting risk transparency helps us select suitable controls and countermeasures. Dürr’s risk management pertains to all levels of the Group, from the Board of Management to the departments of individual national companies. Associated with that is an open risk culture that we have consciously promoted in the past years. It makes employees more sensitive in dealing with risks and encourages them to address threats and problems early and concretely.

Risk management process

Our standard risk cycle has nine stages and starts every six months. The centerpiece is a risk inventory taken by the management of the operating units. Specific risks are identified, classified into specific risk fields and evaluated with the aid of detailed risk structure spreadsheets.

Specific risks are evaluated in three steps. They are carried out by the risk managers of all organizational units for each risk field:

• We first calculate the maximum effect a risk can have on Group EBIT in the next 24 months. We call this the gross exposure.
• We then estimate the risk’s probability of occurrence.
• Finally, we examine the effectiveness of possible countermeasures and evaluate it with a risk-reducing factor.

The EBIT risk goes down more, the less likely it is to occur and the more effective the countermeasures are. The bottom line is a net risk figure, which we also call the actual risk potential. The sum of all the individual risk potentials corresponds to the Group’s overall risk. Neither portfolio effects nor hedging effects are taken into account. The overall risk may be segmented into specific risks in the business units and aggregate risks at the Group level.

Dürr's risk fields: