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Chairman and CEO Statement
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Message from our Chairman and CEO “2010 was an exciting year for SGS. We continued to grow our business, primarily through acquisitions, and secured our sector leadership by delivering services that promote sustainable development, create trust, help manage risk and uncertainty, and bring competitive advantage to our customers. During the year we announced The Plan, an ambitious commitment to achieve a turnover of CHF 8 billion and an operating profit margin of 20% by 2014. Our sustained growth and value to society relies on us managing our environmental footprint whilst upholding the highest standards of integrity, safety and human rights. The leadership team has developed targets that will ensure we achieve our sustainability goals in line with business growth. Over the next three years we will focus on ‘doing more with less’; improving the energy efficiency of our offices and laboratories and ‘greening’ our global systems for IT, car fleets and procurement. We will also need to ensure that we have the right mix of technical skills and competencies in the business by advancing our programmes on leadership, personal development, sustainability awareness, equal opportunities, human rights and community engagement. These initiatives form our core global sustainability programmes which are fully owned by the functions and complement the many initiatives inspired by employees in our local operations which already contribute to sustainable development. While there is more work to be done, we believe that the progress made in 2010 provides a strong foundation to help us towards our goal. We strengthened our management of health and safety with the appointment of a Vice President Group Health and Safety reporting to the CEO. We established sustainability roles amongst our affiliates to work alongside the Vice President Corporate Sustainability and instigated a year-round cycle of Report Assurance using assurors in our regions. We also extended our stakeholder dialogue through an online stakeholder survey on sustainability reporting and management, and created bespoke e-learning modules on sustainability aimed at our employees. Our continued success relies on our entrepreneurial spirit to examine market forces and identify services that respond to changing customer and societal needs. During the year we acquired ten outstanding businesses and in parallel developed new services in the areas of hydrocarbon fingerprinting, specialised seed testing under drought conditions, eco-fuel testing, compressed natural gas cylinder inspections, used oil testing, soil and ground water screening, integrated forest control services and a forest plantation standard. It is this responsiveness to customer needs coupled with our responsible business approach that enabled us to be recognised as a sustainability leader. For the second consecutive year SGS has been included in the Dow Jones Sustainability Europe Index, the most prestigious equity index for companies judged best in class in sustainable business management. This achievement would not have been possible without the talent and dedication of our teams around the world. 2010 was about setting in place a strong foundation to manage a global sustainability programme that will support and help secure our continued business growth. As we embark on this endeavour we will maintain our commitment to corporate sustainability and use our growing network to expand our reach further than ever before. We hope that you will find this Report a useful tool for stakeholder engagement and we look forward to hearing from you on how we can further develop and improve our sustainability reporting.” Sergio Marchionne Christopher Kirk Chairman Chief Executive Officer |
