Introduction

01.1

Our approach to Corporate Sustainability Reporting

In the transition towards more sustainable practices, it is increasingly clear to us that sustainable business is a profitable business. Adopting a modern Corporate Sustainability reporting approach enables our functions to acknowledge the fact that risks and opportunities can be material from both a financial and non-financial perspective. Financially, a robust reporting structure is often cited as an effective way of mitigating risks that could hurt the value of a business. At a higher level, it is virtually impossible to uphold a healthy business without a healthy society, environment and business practices that ensure fairness and respect prevail among all stakeholders.

Sustainability reporting is a vital component of promoting sustainable business. Accurate reporting enables us as a company and the groups that interact with us to manage material financial and non-financial risk factors to ensure long-term value creation. The objective is to back up our financial disclosures with information concerning our sustainability performance. Taking responsibility for the impacts generated through our activities, environmental disclosure is gaining momentum, alongside a variety of other indicators that give insight into our social impacts and approach to governance.

01.2

External Assurance

This report provides a data driven overview of our approach to sustainable development and our sustainability performance according to the German Sustainability Code¹ (DNK) across our E3 strategy around the environment, social, and governance (ESG) aspects. The reference year of all KPIs provided is for the financial year 2021 unless otherwise stated. Our reporting focuses on all our 22 production sites and main offices worldwide as a physical boundary. In reporting according to the DNK, we have chosen to report with reference to the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) disclosures as shown in our GRI index.

PwC Deutschland has provided methodological support on the Double Materiality Assessment processes and validates its accordance with the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS). We obtain external assurance for our corporate carbon footprint calculations from Carbone 4.

To improve the accessibility and transparency of our reporting, we have included a GRI index at the end of the report and footnotes including important references. Alongside this report, our other reporting documents are intended to meet the interests and reporting requirements of a range of different stakeholders.

01.3

The Future is Electric: leveraging the opportunity

Our Environmental Value Proposition – an ongoing project

Along with creating transparency with and for our stakeholders and aiming to act as an exemplary industrial group when it comes to social and environmental impacts, our ambition is to act as an enabler for energy transition and have an impact on climate change mitigation and adaptation actions.

For Hager Group, engaging in a Corporate Sustainability Strategy is also, for a large part, about keeping our eyes on emerging opportunities alongside mitigating risks. There are many ways that our business is well positioned to play an integral part in building a sustainable future for our planet and in supporting a strong social contract.

According to the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)² special report on Global Warming of 1.5°C, this optimistic climate scenario would need the transition in energy, urban infrastructure, and industrial systems to considerably pick up their pace.

The energy transition presents a real opportunity for Hager Group in terms of its environmental value proposition. By offering products and services that support energy efficiency and the adoption of renewable energy, Hager Group positions itself as a responsible and environmentally conscious company. This attracts customers who are looking for sustainable and eco-friendly solutions, and consolidates the group’s overall reputation and brand image. Additionally, by investing in research and development in this area, Hager Group can stay ahead of the competition and offer innovative solutions that support the energy transition and help to reduce carbon emissions.

Enabling our employees and their communities to thrive

Meaningful engagement with sustainability issues is a great motivator for Hager Group employees, both in terms of being able to make a difference in their own work as well as in terms of knowing that they work for a company that does the right thing for people and the planet.

While increasing motivation and engagement is a good lever to encourage employees to stay with our company, being one with strong commitment to sustainable development also helps Hager Group to attract the best talents. This includes both younger employees, just entering the jobs market and looking for a chance to bring their personal values into the workplace, and more experienced recruits who are looking for new challenges. Many talented professionals are searching for meaningful employment aligned with their beliefs about how a company should be run and how it impacts the world and society at large.

We are convinced that our commitment to further transform into a sustainable business management model will enable us to attract and retain the highest calibre of employees in all our markets around the world. Going beyond communication, we tie our collective compensation schemes as an incentive to achieving sustainability performance objectives as part of remuneration policy.

Living up to our company founders’ courageous entrepreneurial spirit, authenticity and integrity shape our future and make us who we are. Our values are at the heart of everything we do and form the basis of our success. Being a good corporate citizen is an integral part of it. We contribute to the sustainable development of the communities where we operate through our activities, providing added value and job opportunities, this also through education focused actions supported by the Peter und Luise Hager Foundation.

01.4

Key Figures: Our Value Chain

Maximising value at all stages of our chain is an ongoing pursuit for Hager Group. While we have from the origin traditionally focused on customer centricity and the processes within our perimeter – labour costs, manufacturing, logistics and the like – we have put in place in the last few years programmes to be able to create even greater value by looking at our resource use in the product life cycle across our entire value chain. This is a data-intensive process, yet one that provides both our internal and external stakeholders a solid understanding of our product’s environmental impacts across the entire chain, from product development, sourcing, and manufacturing through distribution, marketing, use, and disposal.

A highly complex value chain like ours makes strong supply chain management essential. Monitoring issues such as human rights and conflict minerals is a priority.

We analyse the sustainability aspects in our value chain using a life cycle management approach for the environmental issues. Resource use and its associated wastes – such as inefficient consumption of energy, water, or raw materials – represent real costs to suppliers that trickle down the value chain. There are daunting challenges with unlocking the value that is “trapped” upstream in the supply chain with suppliers, potentially many tiers back.

We are continually developing our reporting and measurement systems to assess and manage our progress towards the 10-year goal for 2030 in an integrated way across the entire company and our value chain. We are working on the most comprehensive coverage possible as well as on the quality of the data. This gives us an increasingly clear picture of our footprint and our sustainability performance across our value chain. The table below highlights the different steps of our value chain through programmes and initiatives we have put in place to manage the most important sustainability issues.

Hager Group Value Chain and Sustainability issues

The Sustainability Code, German Council for Sustainable Development

de Coninck, H., A. Revi, M. Babiker, P. Bertoldi, M. Buckeridge, A. Cartwright, W. Dong, J. Ford, S. Fuss, J.-C. Hourcade, D. Ley, R. Mechler, P. Newman, A. Revokatova, S. Schultz, L. Steg, and T. Sugiyama, 2018: Strengthening and Implementing the Global Response. In: Global Warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC Special Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty [Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, H.-O. Pörtner, D. Roberts, J. Skea, P.R. Shukla, A. Pirani, W. Moufouma-Okia, C. Péan, R. Pidcock, S. Connors, J.B.R. Matthews, Y. Chen, X. Zhou, M.I. Gomis, E. Lonnoy, T. Maycock, M. Tignor, and T. Waterfield (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK and New York, NY, USA, pp. 313-444, doi:10.1017/9781009157940.006. Extracted from: https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/chapter-4/

Available to all stakeholders internally and externally along the entire value chain

Designing plastic – Annual Report 2021/22