Reporting on corporate responsibility

Responsibility to people and to the environment has always been important in Outokumpu. Stated in simple terms, our aim is to make sustainable and responsible business practices a central element of all Group operations and strategy. Considering this issue further, it seemed that the trend in corporate responsibility reporting – producing a corporate responsibility report separated from the company's annual and financial report – can create a somewhat misleading concept: that corporate responsibility goals are somehow divorced from our 'core' business. This is not the Outokumpu view. We want to go one step further. To ensure success in the long run, all our operations and contacts with stakeholders must be based on ethical and sustainable business practices.

For this reason, we have once again developed our reporting by completely merging our annual and corporate responsibility reports. No separate section titled 'Corporate responsibility' exists in our 2010 report. Instead, all the information that relates to our responsibility as we conduct our business can be found in sections describing Outokumpu as a company, our business operations and their impact on the environment, our corporate governance, our employees and our impact on society. As we continue to follow the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines in our reporting, and the UN Global Compact principles, information on same issues as in previous years has been supplied, but we do not employ the GRI tripartite division into economic, social and environmental responsibility. Our corporate responsibility reporting has once again been assured by an external assurance provider.

Internationally, the concept and practical results of this kind of integrated reporting is very much a work-in-progress. Being a pioneer involves the making of difficult choices about how to communicate issues in new ways – ways for which generally-recognised guidelines do not yet exist. The new format may leave some readers feeling that specific information on corporate responsibility is now more difficult to find than it used to be. If you are interested in specific issues relating to corporate responsibility, we recommend that you check the GRI and UN Global Compact reporting index, where all the indicators regarding responsibility practices are listed together with links to the pages on which they are addressed.