You are Marleen Devriendt, General Manager of Cobalt Coatings, a Brussels coatings maker. The board has just required that by 2031 a quarter of revenue come from products that do not exist today. You have eight weeks to bring a plan, and the first question is what you do with the €8M of projects that are already committed.
The situation
Cobalt booked €420M of revenue in 2025 at a 16% EBITDA margin, from two plants in Antwerp and Liège and with 1,180 people. 78% of that revenue, €328M, comes from solvent-based coatings, a chemistry European regulation is steadily closing down: those lines lose 4–6% a year, €13–20M of revenue annually, with the highest-margin automotive accounts leaving first. They are still the cash engine that pays for everything.
A quarter of €420M is about €105M of new revenue by 2031. You inherit eleven active projects, and 92% of the spending is incremental: reformulations and improvements of products already on the price list. Almost none of them produces a euro of that €105M.
The annual innovation envelope is €21M and four claims add up to €27M: €8M of committed sustaining projects; a €4M water-based reformulation programme; a bio-based resin platform built in-house at €9M a year; and a co-development with NovaResin, a Ghent spin-off whose resin already works, at €6M a year. Sales wants the water-based programme; R&D wants its own platform. Nobody has proposed cutting anything. And the board has let you know that if the plan is not credible it will appoint a Chief Transformation Officer above you.