ESG materiality assessments help businesses analyze which issues are the most important to their key stakeholders to help them develop their strategies with regards to Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG). Avnet conducted its first comprehensive sustainable materiality assessment1 in 2020 to map key non-financial and ESG indicators important to both our business and stakeholders. The process included three key phases:
- Landscape assessment
- Stakeholder mapping
- Topic analysis and prioritization
The ESG materiality matrix showed findings and highlights on each ESG topic by focus area. The five topics that ranked highest in the materiality assessment are:
- Ethics and compliance
- Occupational health and safety (including COVID-19 response)
- Climate
- Diversity and inclusion
- Economic performance
Avnet determined that four of the top five are integral to its sustainability strategic roadmap. Since the fifth area, economic performance, is a basic expectation about how Avnet operates this is not part of the sustainability strategy. In addition, although health and safety scored high – our main focus during this time was to keep all of our employees safe during the pandemic.
Avnet's highest-ranking ESG materiality topics
Consistently, both internal and external stakeholders gave high rankings to ethics and compliance as well as occupational health and safety. External stakeholders ranked climate higher than internal stakeholders did. Waste emerged as a key topic in the electronics industry that’s important to Avnet’s employees, so it will also be a focus for the company. Both our internal and external stakeholders ranked D&I as a high priority. Going forward the results of the ESG materiality assessment inform Avnet’s ESG strategy, shape decision-making and refine disclosures.
Avnet plans to refresh our materiality assessment during 2024 to further refine and validate our ESG priorities and focus areas.
1Our ESG materiality assessment and analysis was designed to identify the most relevant, or material, issues from an ESG perspective, which is a broader standard than that used in our financial disclosures. The use of “material” or “salient” when referring to ESG topics or risks throughout our ESG reporting is intended to flag the most important issues from our ESG assessment and does not speak to the materiality of those issues to Avnet.
