Strategic direction

Many milestones were reached by Ramboll in Winning Together, our strategy in 2016-2021. Ramboll grew by 35% over the strategy period and built a strong sustainability offering across our markets.

The strategy was extended to 2021 owing to the Covid-19 pandemic. That allowed us time to rebalance our business in a challenging market situation, as well as to develop our new strategy.

The strategy proved successful, strengthening our position and capabilities within sustainability, digitalisation, and innovation, while delivering growth, a deeper and broader geographical footprint, and concluding with the strongest financial performance since 2010.

Expansion in the Americas, the UK and Germany 

A key achievement was the expansion of our business in the Americas. This included the acquisition in 2019 of O’Brien & Geere, a major provider of integrated engineering
solutions.

The acquisition added 900 experts within water, energy, environment, and advanced manufacturing to Ramboll, making the company a multidisciplinary player in the US, while widening the client base. This has contributed to a positive impact on our revenue in the US. Our Americas market today covers the US, Canada, Mexico, and Brazil, with services in water, energy, environment and health, and architecture.

Similarly, our UK geography witnessed a significant positive turnaround during the strategy period. Organic growth, underpinned by focus on key accounts and innovation, has been the cornerstone of that development. 

Germany has developed substantially since 2017, when we largely focused on management consulting. Backed by a strong offering in onshore and offshore wind, as well as major contributions from Transport, during the strategy period, Germany has since matured into a business unit with a broad portfolio.

Our position in the Nordics also remained strong during the strategy period.

Widening our offering in sustainability services and architecture

A key outcome of Winning Together is the establishment of global ‘spearhead’ services. These spearheads cluster expertise and insights from across our organisation, enabling us to differentiate better in the market and deliver higher in the client’s value chain.

The latest spearhead, launched in January 2021, is Strategic Sustainability Consulting. The spearhead is strengthening Ramboll’s position as a key partner in the rapidly growing market for ESG consultancy and´ sustainability strategies. The spearhead merges sustainability insights with management consulting expertise to integrate sustainability across the client value chain. This helps deliver a ful spectrum of solutions, from roadmaps to cut carbon emissions, to providing sustainability assessments and monitoring.

We also strengthened our offering in architecture and design with the acquisition and integration of Henning Larsen and Web Structures in 2020-2021. By securing even stronger connections between sustainability engineering, design excellence, and leading architecture for buildings, cities and landscapes, the new Architecture & Landscape business unit is delivering unique synergies for clients.

The spearheads have financially outperformed the rest of Ramboll’s business during the strategy period.They provide a springboard for our future work, where deep specialisation will be central to delivering value for clients across the project life cycle.

SDGs as a benchmark

We aligned closely with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) during Winning Together, which proved to be a valuable yardstick for measuring and communicating the sustainability of our business.

In 2016, we established a sustainability baseline based on revenue generated from services contributing directly and positively to the SDGs, with a target to increase the share of revenue from these services by 40%, by 2020. We far exceeded that target, reaching a 60% share in 2020, and have progressed our SDG-linked share of revenue in all of
our Markets.

By delivering sustainable solutions across the client’s value chain, we stand out in the increasingly competitive professional services industry. Going forward, we will measure sustainability impacts based on greenhouse gas emissions reporting and alignment to the EU Taxonomy.

Ramboll has launched a new strategy for 2022-2025, titled The Partner for Sustainable Change, deepening our commitment to a sustainable future. With the new strategy, we go all in on sustainability. Our ambition is to drive sustainable change for clients, stakeholders, and society, and become the global leader in the green energy transition.

The new strategy is aligned with our company purpose to create sustainable societies where people and nature flourish, and expresses the value we generate for clients, end users and society, and how we do business. The new strategy is a continuation of our Winning Together strategy (2016-2021), with even stronger focus and greater ambitions to be a global sustainability leader.

Expertise and solutions to enable sustainable transformation

Our stakeholders are impacted by megatrends such as climate change, resource scarcity, environmental degradation, social exclusion, and biodiversity loss. That poses risks such as stranded assets, reputational issues, and stakeholder pressure, as well as opportunities to develop new business models, solutions, and revenue streams.

We want to help them to realise their goals by offering our expertise, deep experience, and sustainable solutions to their pressing challenges, and navigate the transition to a more sustainable future.

As The Partner for Sustainable Change we will focus all our efforts to accelerate sustainable change on four sustainability themes where the needs of clients, stakeholders and society intersect with our expertise.

These four themes are:

Decarbonise for net zero, which tackles the climate crisis with a large-scale shift to renewable energy, energy efficiency, lowcarbon technologies and energy systems, and by decarbonising key sectors such as transportation and the built environment.

Resilient societies and liveability, which addresses the global need for societal development that promotes sustainable living in harmony with nature, such as building resilient infrastructure and low-carbon mobility systems.

Resource management and circularity, which decouples economic growth from the unsustainable use of natural resources by rethinking production and consumption models in business and society – and across value chains.

Biodiversity and ecosystems, where we work to halt and reverse biodiversity loss, leave nature in a better state than before, and apply nature-based solutions.

These four themes help define where we invest, and the clients and projects we prioritise. We will focus our entire portfolio towards these major sustainability themes over the coming four years, partnering and collaborating closely with clients to bring out the best of Ramboll’s sustainability insight, innovation power and design excellence.

In the green energy transition specifically, we will focus our deep technical expertise into renewables and emerging technologies such as green hydrogen, Power-to-X and carbon capture and storage.

We expect to invest up to DKK 2.5 billion into targeted acquisitions to further strengthen our expertise. Moreover, we continue to invest in innovation and digitalisation, helping develop a strong position in scalable technology-enabled consultancy and partnering to scale innovation.

During the entire strategy period, we will make a positive contribution to the sustainable transformation of society through our projects and services, and by sharing our expertise and thought leadership.

Bright minds in an inclusive culture

Becoming The Partner for Sustainable Change requires that we train and up-skill our 16,500 employees to guide clients on sustainability, as well as attracting talent that matches our aspiration for a sustainability-driven transformation.

We aspire to build an organisation of inclusion and belonging and create a workplace that reflects our commitment to society. To that end, we will work to achieve a more balanced organisation with a strong focus on gender representation. Our goal is 40% women and 60% men by 2025. Furthermore, we embed diversity and equity in our people processes to mitigate and challenge bias when making decisions.

We continue to make Ramboll an even more attractive place to work, where employees are valued and empowered to contribute to developing a more sustainable society.