Annual Report 2025
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Annual Report 2025

Strategy

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Annual Report 2025

Strategy

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Our purpose: Innovations for a better world

As a Swiss family enterprise with 165 years of history, we are driven by a strong sense of purpose – creating innovations for a better world. The charter of our owner-family defines our values and long-term objectives: further developing Bühler as an independent family company and generating fair profitability, enabling the company to continue investing in innovation, education, and global infrastructure to best serve our customers. We uphold the Bühler family ethos of respect, integrity, and fairness and act with social, cultural, and ecological responsibility towards employees, customers, and business partners. We exercise ethical corporate governance, respecting local roots, while taking a global perspective. Our values of trust, ownership, and passion are the behavioral principles for all Bühler employees and underpin everything we do, providing a framework for how we achieve our goals and collaborate.

We see profitable growth as a prerequisite for creating positive impact. Our aim is to strengthen our market positions globally as a technology leader, while balancing the needs of humanity, nature, and economy in all our decision-making processes. In choosing Bühler as their partner for processing technologies and services, our customers benefit from enhanced business performance with higher productivity and yields, resulting in better returns on their investment as well as positive environmental impacts. Our comprehensive range of services is designed to further improve the performance and efficiency of our customers’ assets. With a global setup and presence in all major markets, Bühler works to remain a reliable partner for our customers worldwide.

Attaining our goals is only possible with a skilled, educated, and passionate workforce. Therefore, we have declared the safety of our employees to be our top priority. We invest in the training and development of our employees and in so doing, contribute to improving their skills, and their future perspectives. We never compromise on the health and safety of our own employees, or the employees of our customers and our partners. We comply with all applicable rules and regulations, and human rights wherever we do business. 

To create and multiply impact we have built a strong collaboration ecosystem, which we are continuously expanding, with a special focus on innovation and education. It includes partners and customers, universities and research partners, start-ups, and financial partners, as well as non-government organizations and governments.

 

Key elements of our strategy are:

  • We drive customer success through technology and by being close to our customers: We strive to create the best technologies to make our customers more successful and more productive in their dynamic market environments. With our global setup, including decentralized service, supply chain, and production organizations, we reliably support our customers to achieve their goals.
  • We foster an ecosystem-based approach: We collaborate with a growing network of partners to generate innovative technology and business solutions that meet the needs of the world’s population now and in future.
  • We innovate: The demand for sustainable solutions is changing our markets in the food, feed, and mobility industries. As a leading technology provider, we spend 4 to 5% of turnover on research and development annually.
  • We offer the best training, education, and development programs: People are at the center of all Bühler activities: from education and training to career development, health consulting, modern occupational health and safety training, modern work solutions, and career perspectives.
  • We create solutions that contribute to food security and affordable and nutritious food: We do this with our processing solutions and services, research and training centers, and education offering.
  • We are an independent, family-owned company and a reliable partner focused on the long-term: Our values, financial independence, and the speed in decision-making of a family-owned company enable us to set a strategy for the long-term development of our company, and for trustful relationships with our stakeholders.
  • We develop new products for specific markets for processing and application of advanced technical materials: These businesses target applications in the automotive sector, various technical coating fields, including photonics, as well as the inks and battery sectors.

As a family-owned company and a relevant player in our industries, we aim to strengthen our global position as a technology leader by enabling our customers’ success. Operating in 140 countries across the world, our focus is on increasing profitable growth while minimizing footprint. We reinvest most of our profits in innovations for this purpose, and in scaling them as fast as possible. In this sense, sustainability is embedded in all parts of our company. Our research and development efforts are focused on delivering solutions that improve productivity, increase yields, and deliver strong returns. Beyond technology, we support our customers through services, education, and training to maximize the performance and positive impact of their asset base.

Our customers are vital to our success, and we strive to be a trusted and reliable partner. Our objective is to optimize business outcomes for customers, with innovative technologies, processes, services, training offerings, and innovation partnerships. Our extensive global setup continues to prove its value to our customers. With our 105 service stations, 27 manufacturing sites, 3 customer operation centers, 90 sales offices, and research and training centers in 26 locations around the globe, we are close to our customers and support them locally, quickly, and professionally. This customer proximity enables us to support our customers and deliver on our promises, even when situations become critical.

At the core of Bühler’s business model is the transformation of raw materials to intermediate and finished consumer products: from grains to flour, malt, baked goods, and bread; from beans to coffee, chocolate mass, pralines, and bars; from proteins to meat or dairy substitutes; from aluminum to structural car parts; from substrates to coated glass; from pigments to printing inks. Our customer offering consists of complete value-chain solutions with lines, plants, and complete industrial parks, services, and components. Core technologies within our solutions include drying, cleaning, grading, optical sorting, grinding, dispersing, extrusion, roasting, mixing, dosing, thin-film vacuum coating, casting, and many more.

Key to all of this is our highly specialized process and engineering know-how. This is the essence of Bühler: understanding, shaping, and controlling material-transformation processes. This enables us to support our customers on all levels: from recipe development, the evaluation of new finished products, and trials, to scaling to industrial levels and full operational production support in industrial production plants.

Our fast, professional, and reliable services make our customers’ plants more efficient and sustainable. They enable customers to realize more value from their investments and are a major differentiator for Bühler. Services improve the performance and overall productivity of our customers’ existing installed assets by optimizing yield, minimizing energy consumption, reducing waste and water, and by maximizing the valorization of side streams. 

We believe that collaboration between industry players, academia, start-ups, and NGOs is essential to develop the solutions required to meet the needs of a growing global population sustainably. We have therefore established an ecosystem of collaboration and innovation. We connect our ecosystem partners with the process and technology know-how and experience of Bühler employees, and with other participants in our network. The key to unlocking the value of the ecosystem is the openness and capability of our employees. To give this ecosystem a regular focal point, we established the Bühler Networking Days in 2016 and have held this flagship event every 3 years since in Uzwil, Switzerland – most recently in 2025.

Our strategy and targeted programs for people are deeply rooted at Bühler, starting from our lighthouse program – apprenticeship education – to further development programs for experienced people and experts. Our commitment to lifelong learning ensures that all employees are equipped with the skills and knowledge to drive transformational change and multiply our impact.

We extend this commitment to our customers by providing education and training that builds the capabilities of their employees. At our specialist schools for milling, grain, rice, and cocoa processing we offer our customers courses to build expertise in their staff. Our research and training centers offer our customers dedicated training and a platform to test new product ideas and experiment with product innovations. We continuously invest in our schools and research and training centers around the world.

Bühler is an independent, family-owned enterprise in the fifth generation. Our strategy is founded in this setup and the premise of its continuation. Karin, Dr. Maya, and Jeannine Bühler each own a third of the company. The sisters’ top priority is building on the strengths and values of the company and, through this, securing its long-term success. They work to ensure Bühler’s independence and successful development through long-term decisions with a strategic focus on innovation, education, and sustainability.

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Gupfenstrasse 5
Uzwil
9240
Switzerland

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