INNOVATIONS AWARD

ENDURA SpA (Bologna, Italy) is known at an international level mainly for its production of active ingredients and synergists for household insecticides and, in more recent years, as a manufacture of Fine Chemical intermediates and specialities. Innovation, production capacity, high quality and safety standards, customer care and technical assistance are the winning factors enabling Endura to work in an ever-increasing global market.

In its search for innovative companies, “Confindustria” (the Italian Confederation of Industries) recently awarded Endura, along with one other company and among hundreds of participants, the “Innovations Award”, during a ceremony held in Rome on March 6th 2008 in occasion of the “Research and Innovation Day – Passwords for the Future”. This recent event is only one example of the extensive portfolio of activities being promoted since 2005 by "Confindustria", a project aimed at spreading the principle of best practices of innovation at “360°” and sharing them with Italian industries and providing entrepreneurs and managers with the right management tools.

The Innovation Award represented the occasion to identify those companies that believed in innovation, practiced it and succeeded in demonstrating the results in terms of company performance, for the purpose of developing a process of widespread emulation that could allow other Italian industries to obtain similar results. This year, the Innovation award did not only aim at acknowledging those companies most capable of maintaining and increasing their competitiveness by means of 360° innovation, but was also an opportunity for carrying out a thorough check-up of their innovation process.

In 2003, Endura introduced and implemented the new organizational model for Innovation Management and strongly focused R&S activities and projects on the company strategies. In the last five years, Endura has invested more than 8% of its turnover in R&D and the strategic choice for product/process innovation in the Fine Chemical and Speciality fields represents for the company, which employs around 100 people, an obligatory route, since the possibility of growing on a global market is strictly correlated to original innovative capability, protected through patents. Thanks to the significant investments made in R&D, the company has developed know-how of some of the more complex chemical technologies, allowing to expand their range of traditional products into the Fine Chemicals field. Endura has also established a large number of partnerships throughout the world and collaborates extensively with various universities and research institutes both in Italy and abroad.

Endura recently received 1st prize in the 2007 Edition of the Italian Business Awards for the Environment, “Premio Impresa Ambiente”, sponsored by the Ministry for the Environment and the Ministry for Economical Development for a patented process for the synthesis of dihydrosafrole, which made possible the substitution of a strategic raw material of natural origin whose production entailed devastating deforestation.

Endura is UNI ISO 9001:2000 and UNI EN ISO 14001:2004 certified and operates according to the Responsible Care philosophy. Its products have been registered in many countries throughout the world and relevant Dossiers have been submitted to the European Commission for inclusion in Annex I of the pending Biocide Directive.

Bologna (Italy), March 25th, 2008