Who we are
Coats is a world leader in thread manufacturing and structural components for apparel and footwear, as well as an innovative pioneer in performance materials.
These critical solutions are used to create a wide range of products, including ones that provide safety and protection for people, data, and the environment. Headquartered in the UK, Coats is a FTSE250 company and a FTSE4Good Index constituent. Revenues in 2023 were $1.4bn.
Trusted by the world's leading companies to deliver vital, innovative, and sustainable solutions, Coats provides value-adding products, including apparel, accessory and footwear threads, structural components for footwear and accessories, fabrics, yarns, and software applications. Customer partners include companies from the apparel, footwear, automotive, telecoms, personal protection, and outdoor goods industries.
With a proud heritage dating back more than 250 years and a spirit of evolution to constantly stay ahead of changing market needs, Coats has operations across some 50 countries with a permanent workforce of more than 15,000, serving its customers worldwide.
Coats connects talent, textiles, and technology, to make a better and more sustainable world. Worldwide, there are four dedicated Coats Innovation and Sustainability Hubs, where experts collaborate with partners to create the materials and products of tomorrow. It participates in the UN Global Compact and is committed to Science Based sustainability targets for 2030 and beyond, with a goal of achieving net-zero by 2050. Coats is also committed to achieving its goals in Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, workplace health & safety, employee & community wellbeing, and supplier social performance.
Strategy
Accelerate profitable sales growth by leveraging innovation, sustainability, digital technologies and our global scale to create world class products and services, delivering value to our stakeholders.
Accelerate profitable sales growth
- Apparel
Increase our market share by delivering sustainable, innovative and value-added products and service solutions to our global customer base. Our unique ability to deliver sustainable products at the scale, speed and quality required by our customers positions us strongly in the market place. - Footwear
Focus on sustainability-led innovations to improve product offerings to key brands and manufacturers, and leverage our newly created scale to drive efficiencies, share gains, and commercial synergies. - Performance Materials
Lead with innovative and sustainable developments in highly engineered products, creating solutions for attractive and growing markets.
Transform the business
- Strategic projects
Over the last two years, Coats has undertaken a number of strategic projects to improve margins by optimising the portfolio and footprint, improving the overall cost base efficiency and mitigating the structural labour availability issues in the US. These transformational initiatives have been successfully delivered and have realised accelerated benefits of $57 million over 2022 and 2023. A further $13 million of benefits will be delivered in 2024.
Capital allocation
Our capital allocation policy remains unchanged and focusses on four key pillars
- reinvesting in organic growth
- acquisitions in line with disciplined strategy
- supporting pensions
- paying a progressive dividend
Our purpose provides the basis for our strategy whereby we will accelerate profitable sales growth and transform the business to improve margins and create sustainable value for our shareholders, customers, employees and the communities in which we operate. Our strategic goals are underpinned by the following enablers:
Sustainability
Sustainability is a core part of our wider business strategy and an imperative to our mid- and long term business success. Playing our part in mitigating climate change is core to our strategy, with commitments made to reduce carbon emissions in line with science-based targets and underpinned by energy transition to renewables and substitution of materials to non-Virgin oil based resources.
Innovation
Innovation is at the heart of everything we do. We recognise that big, bold, game changing ideas are crucial to our success.
We continue to accelerate our innovation credentials and solutions to deliver tailored solutions to customer design requirements.
Digital
Our investment in technology infrastructure and digital tools has allowed us to flex our supply chain, react to situations with speed and ensure we are focussed on customer, shareholder and employee value creation.