Our Strategy
Successful strategy refined to reflect changes in overall conditions
The strategy established at the time of the IPO with its four pillars has proved effective, supporting Vonovia’s business and growth path over the past few years. The overall conditions have changed since the IPO, which has implications for corporate management.
Whereas only a few years back, the shareholder value perspective was the main focus, nowadays, a company’s actions have to focus on all of its stakeholders. All corporate stakeholders have had to deal with significant changes in the recent past. Explicit examples of such stakeholder groups include tenants/customers, employees, banks, investors, suppliers, as well as society at large and our natural environment.
Not only the increasingly dynamic development of megatrends, but also the ever louder calls made by various stakeholder groups for a sustainable business model and the complex overall conditions we are faced with at present mean that the focal points of the company’s strategy have to be reviewed on an ongoing basis and its various components analyzed. The cornerstones of our sustainable strategy are:
- Contribution to climate protection and reducing CO2 (E)
- Social responsibility for our tenants, customers and employees (S)
- Trustworthy, reliable and transparent corporate governance based on the best-practice guidelines set out in the Corporate Governance Code (G).
Vonovia has an organizational unit reporting to the CEO to analyze, coordinate and drive the company’s strategy and, as a result, explicitly sustainability aspects in the context of the strategy and the business model, on an ongoing basis. A steering group, the Sustainability Committee, has also been set up. It includes the entire Management Board as well as the individuals responsible for strategy & sustainability, corporate communications, investor relations, controlling, accounting and business innovation.
In order to calibrate its sustainability endeavors correctly, Vonovia conducts a regular materiality analysis or reviews this analysis to define areas for action and develop a sustainability roadmap based on the results. The materiality analysis is currently being reviewed in light of the requirements of the CSRD Directive.
The megatrends of demographic change, urbanization/shortage of housing, and climate protection/sustainability remain the basic framework underpinning the strategy.
In view of the challenging conditions for the residential real estate sector since the start of 2022, the Management Board has broken down the strategy and its pillars into key value drivers. This has not resulted in any changes to our mission statement. People remain at the center of everything we do, and we are committed to living up to this responsibility. Decisions are always made looking at the overall context of customer centricity, employee satisfaction and sustainability with a view to the future.