Re­search and de­vel­op­ment (R&D) ex­penses in the Group amounted to around EUR 14,599 thou­sand (13,652) in 2024. On av­er­age, 141 (133) em­ploy­ees worked in R&D, which to­gether con­tributed to a prod­uct nov­elty rate of 25.2% (28.5) for all de­vel­op­ment lo­ca­tions of the Uzin Utz Group. The dis­ci­pli­nary man­age­ment of the local R&D de­part­ments is the re­spon­si­bil­ity of the re­spec­tive man­ag­ing di­rec­tors of the na­tional com­pa­nies. The cen­tral R&D head­quar­ters in Ulm is re­spon­si­ble for the tech­ni­cal man­age­ment and co­or­di­nates the global di­rec­tive com­pe­tence for a fur­ther 11 R&D lab­o­ra­to­ries (ex­clud­ing the two lo­ca­tions of Uzin Utz Tools GmbH & Co. KG.) within the Uzin Utz Group. The ex­penses for R&D at Uzin Utz SE amounted to EUR 6,743 thou­sand (6,006) in 2024. The av­er­age of 58 (57) em­ploy­ees in the SE achieved an SE nov­elty rate of 37.7% (36.0) for the Uzin brand in the 2024 re­port­ing year. Prod­ucts with un­prece­dented or greatly im­proved prop­er­ties are clas­si­fied as "new" if their mar­ket­ing uti­liza­tion can be proven and they are not older than five years. The prod­ucts de­vel­oped by Uzin Utz SE at the main de­vel­op­ment site in Ulm have a Blue Angel/Emi­code EC1 Plus rate of 97.4% (97.1) in re­la­tion to sales. This rate again clearly un­der­lines the sus­tain­abil­ity ef­forts of Uzin Utz. The Group's key R&D fig­ures are as fol­lows in the table overview 2024:

De­scrip­tion of the prod­uct range

The in­no­v­a­tive strength of Uzin Utz SE is doc­u­mented by the total of 14 (14) new prod­ucts that were pre­pared for launch for the Uzin brand in 2024. In Jan­u­ary 2024, the first part of the new Uzin Fu­sion­Tec lev­el­ling com­pound gen­er­a­tion was suc­cess­fully launched with Uzin NC 580 and Uzin NC 570, as pre­sented in last year's R&D man­age­ment re­port. For the fur­ther roll­out in this process, the other new prod­ucts Uzin NC 585 F, NC 560 and NC 550 were pre­pared for the up­com­ing mar­ket launch in the course of the re­port­ing year. The three Fu­sion­Tec prod­ucts men­tioned above in the sec­ond launch phase, like the prod­ucts launched in the pre­vi­ous pe­riod, not only com­bine the pos­i­tive at­trib­utes of ce­ment and gyp­sum lev­el­ling com­pounds, but also set quickly and al­most crack-​free even under un­favourable con­struc­tion site con­di­tions and also make a sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion to re­duc­ing the Global Warm­ing Po­ten­tial (GWP) com­pared to con­ven­tional ce­ment lev­el­ling com­pounds. This con­tin­ues the sus­tain­abil­ity trend of Uzin Utz's pre­vi­ous years.

The most im­por­tant other Uzin Utz SE ac­tiv­i­ties of the R&D de­part­ments in co­op­er­a­tion with cross-​divisional de­part­ments and the cross-​location in­vest­ment lab­o­ra­to­ries of the Uzin Utz Group for the Uzin brand (ex­clud­ing the Sursee site) are de­scribed below in a key­word overview table:

The most im­por­tant ac­tiv­i­ties of the other brand of the Uzin Utz um­brella brand are also de­scribed in key words below:

codex Prod­ucts

No new prod­ucts were launched under the codex brand in the 2024 re­port­ing year.