What are the material issues the company has identified?

In its 2019 Sustainability Report Lamberti identified a range of material issues, such as product innovation and intellectual property, ethics and integrity, environmental compliance, employee welfare and health and safety, product sustainability. Among these, creating economic value for its stakeholders stands out as a key material issue for Lamberti.

Stakeholder engagement in accordance with the GRI Standards

The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) defines the Principle of Stakeholder Inclusiveness when identifying material issues (or a company’s most important impacts) as follows:

“The reporting organization shall identify its stakeholders, and explain how it has responded to their reasonable expectations and interests.”

Stakeholders must be consulted in the process of identifying a company’s most important impacts and their reasonable expectations and interests must be taken into account. This is an important cornerstone for CSR / sustainability reporting done responsibly.

Key stakeholder groups Lamberti engages with:

Stakeholder Group

Financial Communities

Authorities

Clients

Media

Suppliers

Communities

Competitors

Shareholders

Trade Associations

Consumers and their families

Scientific Community / Universities

Consumers

Associations

How stakeholder engagement was made to identify material issues

To identify and prioritise material topics Lamberti requested stakeholders to evaluate material issues through an online questionnaire, asking them to assess relevance, on a scale from 1 to 5, regarding topics identified as material. The questionnaire achieved an excellent overall response rate of 64%, with a remarkable 73% of suppliers, 63% of employees and 62% of clients. Additionally, all universities and 2 out of 3 trade associations and banks/insurances responded to the questionnaire.

 

In 2019, Lamberti generated a direct economic value equal to over € 508 million, a slight increase of 0.6% compared to 2018 (€ 505 million).

What actions were taken by Lamberti to create economic value for its stakeholders?

In its 2019 Sustainability Report Lamberti reports that it took the following actions for creating economic value for its stakeholders:

• Creating economic value for employees
• Overall, approximately 90% of the economic value Lamberti created in 2019 was distributed to its stakeholders, both internal and external, while the remaining 10% was retained within the company. In 2019, the predominant share (77%) of the total distributed value went to suppliers. However, in the same year, and in line with the previous year, 20% of total distributed value went to personnel. It included total payroll (including employee salaries and amounts paid to government institutions on behalf of employees) plus total benefits.

• Creating economic value for the Government, financial backers and the community
• In 2019, 2% of the economic value distributed by Lamberti went to the Government mainly through taxes, for a value of over € 11 million. Additionally, payments to financial backers and community investments were made, including voluntary donations plus investments of funds in the broader community, where the target of beneficiaries was external to Lamberti.

Which GRI Standards and corresponding Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have been addressed?

The GRI Standard addressed in this case is: Disclosure 201-1 Direct economic value generated and distributed

Disclosure 201-1 Direct economic value generated and distributed corresponds to:

• Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth
• Targets: 8.1, 8.2
• Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
• Targets: 9.1, 9.4, 9.5

 

78% of the world’s 250 largest companies report in accordance with the GRI Standards

SustainCase was primarily created to demonstrate, through case studies, the importance of dealing with a company’s most important impacts in a structured way, with use of the GRI Standards. To show how today’s best-run companies are achieving economic, social and environmental success – and how you can too.

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References:

1) This case study is based on published information by Lamberti, located at the link below. For the sake of readability, we did not use brackets or ellipses. However, we made sure that the extra or missing words did not change the report’s meaning. If you would like to quote these written sources from the original, please revert to the original on the Global Reporting Initiative’s Sustainability Disclosure Database at the link:

http://database.globalreporting.org/

2) https://www.globalreporting.org/standards/gri-standards-download-center/

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