From Shape to Growth

dormakaba operates in an attractive industry shaped by powerful societal and market trends. In this environment, our strategy is centered on unlocking the company’s full potential to accelerate sustainable, profitable growth. Our current strategic program “From Shape to Growth” focuses on three value drivers to deliver on our growth potential: Elevate Performance, Reduce Complexity, and Innovate & Grow, all underpinned by a leading position in sustainability.

Elevate Performance: driving operational excellence

Initiatives in this pillar focus on increasing efficiency and performance across all areas of our business. Our transformation program includes initiatives for leaner manufacturing, focused and smarter procurement, optimized R&D capabilities, and simplified administrative processes in areas like Finance and HR, all supported by shared service centers. Since its launch in 2023, the program has generated significant cost savings and performance improvements. The initiative will deliver CHF 170 million in annual savings by FY 2025/26.

Our commercial transformation is optimizing productivity and customer centricity of the commercial organization through shared services, automation, and digitalization. These efforts are projected to contribute an additional CHF 40 million in yearly savings by FY 2027/28. Supporting our actions is our investment in building a performance culture – empowering our people to thrive in a high performance environment.

Reduce Complexity: streamlining for scale and agility

Reducing complexity across our portfolio, operations, and processes is key to increasing agility, strengthening execution, and unlocking scalable growth. Our efforts in this pillar are focused on simplifying what we offer, how we work, and how we deliver – always with customer value and efficiency in mind.

We are systematically streamlining our hardware and software portfolio to boost customer relevance, operational efficiency, and innovation speed. As a first milestone, we are optimizing our door closer range with a modular, customer-centric offering – an initiative expected to generate CHF 10 million in annual savings by 2027/28 for the first product line, with a further CHF 10 million beyond from subsequent product lines. Similar streamlining across other product lines – including a significant reduction in software platforms – will follow, improving time-to-market and cost performance.

We are simplifying how we operate through unified, company-wide processes. This harmonization (One dormakaba) improves collaboration, execution speed, and scalability across our global organization. We are continuing to build a resilient, efficient global supply chain. Further reinforcing our strong local-for-local footprint enables faster, more flexible responses to local customer needs. In addition, optimized sourcing from best-cost countries will improve our overall cost competitiveness and adaptability in a dynamic global environment.

Innovate & Grow: accelerating innovation and optimizing market reach

Initiatives in this pillar focus on accelerating innovation, capturing market opportunities by optimizing go-to-markets, and enhancing customer value – with a focus on our core markets, in particular our largest and most important market, North America. Further inorganic growth opportunities will be leveraged through participating in the ongoing industry consolidation.

Innovation is central to our growth ambitions. We are consistently evolving our products into connected, interoperable solutions, integrated within smart building ecosystems that add value to customers across attractive vertical growth markets.

In North America, we are strengthening our position with a Growth Plan that focuses on selected geographies and distribution accounts in our Access Hardware Solutions, while improving commercial productivity and enhancing our product offerings. In Access Automation Solutions, we are further enhancing our portfolio and strengthening our go-to-market via own branches and an expanded partner channel. In Access Control Solutions, we are building on our strength in hospitality, further developing the multi-housing business and strengthening and bundling our offering for the commercial access control segment. This plan targets GDP+2% annual growth.

We are also strengthening our vertical market approach, focusing on high-potential verticals such as airports, data center, and critical infrastructure. We deliver market-leading solutions to our customers by reinforcing our sales approach with vertical-specific value propositions and bundling our respective portfolio. In parallel, we are stepping up our M&A activities to participate in the ongoing industry consolidation, targeting acquisitions that strengthen our offering, expand channel penetration in our core markets, and thereby create additional leadership positions.

Sustainability: differentiator and key enabler

Sustainability is embedded in our strategy as both a competitive differentiator and a key enabler of customer value. Our customers increasingly demand solutions that align with their ESG goals – dormakaba meets this need through energy-efficient, durable, and ethically sourced offerings. By integrating responsible practices across our value chain, we help customers achieve their environmental targets while enhancing our own resilience, innovation, and long-term market relevance.

Selected achievements in strategy execution 2024/25

Well positioned to capitalize on global industry and technology trends

dormakaba is strategically aligned to benefit from powerful societal, industry, and technological trends that are reshaping the built environment. As urbanization accelerates and smart cities expand, demand for intelligent, secure, and sustainable building solutions is growing steadily. People are rethinking how they live and work, seeking environments that offer safety, convenience, and climate resilience.

This shift is driving long-term growth across the construction sector – especially in building modernization, which is projected to grow at a compound annual rate of 4–5%. Energy efficiency is now a key differentiator, not only in new projects, but also in the retrofitting of existing infrastructure. Customers increasingly prioritize systems with high energy efficiency, minimal maintenance, and strong sustainability credentials – areas where dormakaba already offers leading solutions and continues to invest in R&D.

Technological advancement is further accelerating change. As data becomes central to building operations, the need for digitalization and system integration is increasing. By 2028, more than four billion IoT devices are expected to be connected within commercial buildings, enabling smarter access control, real-time monitoring, and data-driven building management. End-users now expect more: flexible access for visitors and employees, efficient use of space, smooth and secure movement throughout buildings, and greater interoperability across platforms and suppliers. These evolving needs are driving a growing market for cloud-connected, scalable solutions that integrate seamlessly with existing building management ecosystems.

dormakaba is uniquely equipped to meet these demands. With strong foundations in mechanics, electromechanics, digitalization and system integration, the company delivers secure, seamless access in complex, dynamic environments. Our deep technical expertise and innovation focus enable us to create future-ready solutions that address the most pressing challenges of modern building design and operation.

As these global trends intensify, dormakaba is well placed to deliver long-term value – combining technological strength with a clear strategic vision to support the evolving needs of customers, partners, and society in the places that matter to them.