with Managing Chairman Florent Menegaux Interview 01 market conditions. My thoughts go first to the employees directly impacted by these transformations. Throughout, our top priority is to fulfill the Group’s commitments, both to helping everyone find a stable career future and to recreating at least as many jobs in the impacted community. This situation calls for us to get back to basics, to the people who make Michelin what it is every day. Our Group succeeds when every member of the corporate community is personally growing and pursuing a fulfilling career path. Since January 1, 2024, the living wage initiative has been deployed around the world, to ensure that everyone is paid enough to enable a family of two adults and two children to meet their food, housing, travel and education needs while saving for contingencies and the future. We work with an independent NGO to confirm that compensation offered across the Group complies with this benchmark, including cost of living adjustments. In most cases, this positions the Michelin Group well above each host country’s legal minimum wage. This is how we can enable everyone to look to the future with confidence, and how we will all succeed together. How is Michelin progressing towards its objective of building a world-leading manufacturer of life-changing composites and experiences? We are continuing to showcase our distinctive capabilities in an increasingly wider range of markets. Our ability to leverage our proficient materials expertise to design composites with a myriad of applications is constantly reshaping our playing field. The most iconic of these composites that are transforming our daily lives are tires. They are also the most complex, with more than 200 components that are carefully fabricated and assembled using processes that we are constantly reinventing. The common features shared by all the composites we make are their high technological content and the fact that without them, a system could not function. They are always mission-critical. This is the case, for example, with our conveyors, or the seals that we engineer for the aerospace industry. Our araminolic adhesive resins also make a real difference, by combining high performance with plant-sourced components that are kinder to the planet and our health. This concern for our customers’ success is also embedded in the experiences we offer. Our understanding of usage patterns and our data intelligence enable us to design innovative solutions to help our fleet Concerning the planet, the 13% reduction in our Scopes 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions, i.e. from our direct activities, is a remarkable step forward that aligns us with the pathway to keeping global warming below 1.5°C, as approved by the independent standards-setting organization SBTi. We also further reduced our water withdrawals, by 7% over the year, and increased the proportion of recycled and renewable materials in all our products, to a total 31%. These advances made in just one year fill me with pride in what Michelin teams do every day. The three aspects of people development, economic and financial performance, and protection of the planet and its resources are truly interdependent and mutually beneficial. We will continue to improve our performance in each one. How is Michelin adjusting to its international business environment? I think it’s important to take a step back and look at the Group’s recent past to realize just how complex, volatile and uncertain our operating environment is right now. It has been lastingly transformed by the overlapping impact of one crisis after another, which has been particularly striking since Covid. We’ve learned to navigate in this new world, staying the clear course set by our Michelin in Motion 2030 strategy. Our presence in 174 countries, as well as the diversity of our markets, means that we are directly engaged with the world and the way it is changing. In particular, we can detect even the weakest signals of coming transformations before they spread more widely. This is also a factor of resilience, since our broad geographic footprint enables us to foresee coming shocks more clearly and absorb them when they occur. Plus, our long-standing local-to-local approach confers a decisive strength at a time when world trade is under unprecedented strain. In this kind of environment, more than ever, we absolutely have to remain competitive. Today, our responsibility is to ensure that the Group continues to act as a powerful source of innovation in the decades ahead. In this regard, I’d like to say a few words about the industrial restructuring projects carried out in 2024. In France, China, Poland and Sri Lanka, we’ve had to make difficult decisions to shut down or scale back operations in response to structurally deteriorating 9 2024 UNIVERSAL REGISTRATION DOCUMENT_MICHELIN
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