Coatings World - March 2016

automotive coatings markets globally and on further strengthening our leading position in the Brazilian decorative paints market with our brand Suvinil.

McGarry: From an overall PPG perspective, we remain focused on delivering higher organic growth including continued commercialization of our innovative industry leading coatings technologies. Over the past several years, we have deployed many new or leading technologies for our end-used markets. These include our compact process technology for automotive OEM coatings, which has been widely adopted by customers as it reduces their facility, construction cost and ongoing operating cost.

Our water-based automotive refinish coatings is now the leading water-based product in the industry. We’ve converted more auto body repair shops at waterborne coatings than the rest of the entire coatings industry combined. Our new Innovel interior can coatings realized growing customer adoption over the past year. This allowed us to deliver mid-single-digit percentage growth, which is well above the packaging coatings industry growth rates, with more to come in 2016.

In addition to organic growth, we will continue to be aggressive on cost and productivity initiatives. This is a never-ending quest for PPG, and we are always looking for better ways to improve our cost structure.

Finally, our balance sheet remains strong, as we ended the year with cash and short-term investments of $1.5 billion. We intend to continue creating shareholders value through earnings accretive cash deployment. We remain on-pace with our prior commitments to deploy between $2 billion and $2.5 billion of cash in the years 2015 and 2016 combined, including the $1.15 billion we deployed in 2015. We expect coatings industry consolidation to continue in 2016. Our pipeline remains strong as we continue to vest potential acquisitions around the world. Share repurchases also remain an integral part of our capital allocation strategy.

Roy: The main strategy is to focus on the Indian market which is a fairly large market and most importantly growing very fast. We need to introduce innovative products and services to bolster growth in 2016 and beyond.

Shaver: We will continue to focus our resources on our existing customers in the global transportation arena, both light and commercial vehicle OEMs, and our refinish and industrial customers. Capital projects to increase capacity came on line in China and Germany, for example, and we are poised to meet increased demand across the customer based supplied out of those facilities. We will continue to expand our leading global refinish business both through our premium product lines and by further developing our offerings in the mainstream segment. At the same time, we will look at ways to broaden our offerings through acquisitions like ChemSpec and Metalak, with our increased ownership of Axalta Central America, and

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