Stefan Dräger Videobotschaft: 125 Jahre mit dem Herzen dabei

Hello and good day, I am Stefan Dräger, Chairman of the Executive Board of Drägerwerk. This year we are celebrating the 125th anniversary of our family business. For many, many years, Dräger has stood for technology for life. Because our technology is used in situations we never want to be in, situations where life is at stake, either one's own life or the life of others. To protect, support, or save that life. That is what everything revolves around for us. In our long history, many people were involved in developing the right products and solutions for our customers. Over the years, something valuable of its own emerged: a corporate personality that has developed and continues to develop with its own DNA. This DNA enables us today to develop positively. It is the driving force for everyone connected with our company: our customers, our employees, and our business partners. Many of them have been working with us for decades. For 125 years, we have been heart and soul committed to the most valuable asset we have: life.

We in marketing also carry the Dräger DNA within us. Therefore, the customer is at the center of all our considerations and activities. Our goal is that whenever a customer comes into contact with Dräger, it should be a positive experience. Our campaigns and initiatives support and advise our customers during the purchase decision and when using our products. We support this through consistent communication across all media, precisely tailored to the needs of each customer group, to create a memorable image in the minds of our customers. Dräger has been continuously family-led since its founding. Starting with the founder Heinrich Dräger, his son Bernhard, my grandfather Heinrich, my father Christian, my uncle Theo, up to me, Stefan Dräger. That is five generations. As over 100-year-old family businesses, we have a moving and exciting story to tell that still shapes our corporate culture. The greatest concern of my great-grandfather was to use his technical skills for the satisfaction of his customers. That carries us to this day. Our origin is our future. This saying also applies to us.

The success of our company is based on four strengths worldwide: customer proximity, engaged employees, constant innovation, and quality in everything we do. These four strengths are important values that guide our daily work. The Dräger Academy offers its customers, business partners, and internal employees in sales and service organizations the knowledge they need for their daily work. For our internal employees, we offer a globally standardized training program that enables them to represent the Dräger brand, products, and solutions confidently to customers. For our customers, the name Dräger Academy stands for high-quality training that increases enthusiasm for our products. With us, they learn what they really need: knowledge for reality. Dräger is a very dynamic company that stands on a solid foundation. Founded in 1889, we have developed from a small watchmaker's workshop into a global company and are today world market leader in many of our fields of activity. Our customers, together with our dedicated employees from research and development, production, marketing, sales, and service, have written the 125-year success story of the company. Many products and solutions emerged from dialogue and close collaboration and cooperation. Our company history drives us to top performance but is also an obligation we fulfill with pride.

For the future, Dräger is well prepared. We reinvest over eight percent of our sales into developing new products and build the foundation for sustainable growth. Developing innovative and successful products means always being on the pulse of time. That means knowing the latest technologies, evaluating them, and incorporating them into our products, whether through integration of IT solutions in communication technology or through complex sensor technology, which makes our products more reliable and also more powerful. But developing innovative and successful products also means knowing the customer's world exactly. That means the workflows and the work steps. Only then are we able to create solutions with our technology that the customers truly validate. Together with well over 10,000 employees in over 50 subsidiaries and our sales partners in almost every country in the world, we have spun a network that supplies hospitals, industrial processors, mining, fire departments, and rescue services with the technology to which they unconditionally entrust their own lives or the lives of others.

The Dräger Service is one of our greatest customer instruments. We are always there to advise and support them when they need us. Around the globe, we are daily with more than 200,000 service technicians on the job for them. And this regardless of the tasks they perform. These tasks include the maintenance and repair work of our products at their site or at our online service centers, training of them on our products and their application, the individual development of contracts and solutions for them, consulting, project planning. After so many years of successful company history, we want to take the opportunity in 2014 to celebrate together with everyone and to let all participate who have been connected with our company for such a long time. With numerous activities worldwide, such as customer and employee events and an exhibition of historic Dräger moments, we want to celebrate our company's birthday. A special birthday website will regularly report on our activities throughout the year. Together with our customers, employees, and business partners, we will close the circle from our origin to our future. I am looking forward to an exciting year together with you.