We'll do this through the business cycle in our rapidly changing world, where material demand will continue to rise but an increasingly sustainable and circular economy will be required.
We've seen the value in creating the only truly global steel and mining champion and we seek to maintain a leading position in attractive product-market segments worldwide through active portfolio management. We operate through all parts of the steel value chain, wherever we see opportunities to create value.
This includes the mining of raw materials through downstream transformation and distribution activities, especially where these provide synergies to our core activities in steel. We see the value of being present in both developed markets, with higher per capita steel demand and sophisticated, high-value product offerings, and developing markets, which offer strong long-term growth potential.
Our large and global asset base provides us with a unique opportunity to benchmark and leverage scale and scope to maintain world-class operations that produce a wide range of steels for the mobility, construction, infrastructure, industrial and energy sectors.
Our global research and development team, with two R&D laboratories located in North America, is relentlessly pushing both process and product innovation frontiers, inventing smarter steels to further enhance our product and service offerings to meet our customers’ evolving needs. And taking advantage of steel’s unique ability to be completely reusable and recyclable, we are developing innovative processes that use less energy, emit less carbon, and reduce costs.