Our Purpose - Read our story
We are Boehringer Ingelheim - a different kind of pharmaceutical company
Family-owned. Purpose-led. Innovation-driven
We serve humankind by improving health for people and animals
In 1885, in the southern German town of Ingelheim, Albert Boehringer started a small bio-technology company founded on innovation and responsibility. 135 years later, Boehringer Ingelheim is a global pharmaceutical company, nowadays making medicines for people and animals. Today’s world is vastly different from Albert’s, but our founding values remain the same. We remain driven by a desire to improve health. This profound sense of purpose is in our DNA.
Boehringer Ingelheim is still a family owned company, which is unusual and valuable in the broader landscape of pharmaceuticals. We are not beholden to the stock market like many others, instead we answer to society. We plan in generations, not quarters, meaning we can take long term decisions that may not drive profit overnight but will ultimately benefit patients.
These days, the way we deliver healthcare improvements is inherently more sophisticated than Albert could have imagined. When we look at the specific challenges of improving health for patients here in the UK, they are complex. However, we are clear about how our unique strengths can deliver value, focusing on three core areas: scientific innovation, sustainable healthcare and digital transformation.
When it comes to scientific innovation, we take on the biggest challenges in medicine. We are at the forefront of advancing research through open innovation, and sharing compounds for research with the wider Life Sciences community. Our clinical trials are becoming increasingly patient focused as we continue to invest in finding solutions to unmet medical needs.
We are committed to sustainable healthcare, planning for the long term alongside the NHS, helping it meet objectives outlined in The Long Term Plan.1 We partner in numerous Joint Working projects, piloting new models of care aiming to improve the patient pathway experience and reduce the burden on hospitals.
We are committed to tackling the challenge of climate change and are one of the first pharmaceutical companies in the UK to become a carbon neutral organisation. We are continually looking at ways to reduce our carbon footprint, to offset unavoidable emissions and to think innovatively to find answers to the most pressing questions of our time.
Today, technology plays a huge role in helping us deliver scientific innovation and sustainable healthcare solutions. We are driving digital transformation by pushing the capabilities of artificial intelligence, partnering with start-ups and backing initiatives to ensure technology is an enabler not a barrier. Again, our family-owned status gives us freedom to invest where we feel it matters most, following the science – not the market.
Today we employ over 700 people around the UK, committed to improving health for patients and animals. As we look to the future, we can’t pretend it’s going to be easy. But just like Albert all those years ago, we believe that challenge is the seed of innovation, from which progress will flourish.
1 The NHS Long Term Plan: https://www.longtermplan.nhs.uk/publication/nhs-long-term-plan/
NP-GB-104942 September 2024