Priorities and objectives up until 2025
Digitisation is impacting the economy and society more and more over time. As Switzerland’s leading ICT company, Swisscom bears a special responsibility in this respect. It has to seize opportunities that could benefit the country’s welfare as they arise, while keeping a careful eye on potential risks. In other words, its involvements and impacts in the future must be driven by a keen sense of curiosity but also a keen sense of responsibility.
The stakeholder survey carried out in the spring of 2018 showed that ethics and integrity of action based on ethical principles are more important than ever. Swisscom therefore endeavours to make technical advances accessible to everyone and prevent their misuse, honouring principles of ethics and integrity of action. The potential of smart data, artificial intelligence, Industry 4.0, smart cities, smart homes and eSports presents challenges for society as a whole and for companies like Swisscom in particular.
Moreover, the stakeholder survey shows that while Swisscom’s 2020 CR strategy addresses the relevant social issues, it no longer fully reflects the rapid progress occurring in the industry.
Swisscom has therefore revised and focused its 2020 CR strategy and geared it to a time horizon up to 2025.
2018 will be the last year for which the Sustainability Report refers primarily to the 2020 sustainability targets. From 2019 onwards, Swisscom will focus on the sustainability targets for 2025 and will address three core challenges of the digital information society in depth:
- The digital skills of people living in a networked world have to be honed. While technologies advance at great speed, people’s skills do not simply change without help. The ability to relate competently to a digital “other” is vital in almost every area of life – for schoolchildren, for fathers and mothers, and for politicians and citizens, whether young or old. Anyone embedded in a value creation chain has to keep up with the demands of the networked world.
- Making a decisive contribution to global climate protection is essential. Climate change is a global problem of the first order, with repercussions that are impacting Switzerland more and more every year. All countries must contribute in major ways to climate protection. Digitisation harbours promising possibilities for this effort.
- Reliable, secure infrastructure is fundamental to Switzerland’s competitiveness and quality of life and must, therefore, be continually developed.
In response to these challenges, Swisscom has formulated three objectives for contributing to the well-being of people, the environment and Switzerland as a nation:
- Doing more for people: Swisscom enables people in Switzerland to make use of the opportunities presented by a networked world. It is helping two million people to develop their digital skills and is improving working conditions in its supply chain, and it will maintain this focus until at least 2025. Swisscom also provides training to 1,000 apprentices.
- Doing more for the environment: Swisscom cares about the environment. It is working with its customers to reduce its CO2 emissions by 450,000 tonnes. This corresponds to 1% of Switzerland’s greenhouse gas emissions.
- Doing more for Switzerland: Swisscom uses the best networks and progressive solutions to create added value for its customers, employees, shareholders and suppliers, and for Switzerland. It provides everyone and all businesses in Switzerland with reliable ultrafast broadband. By doing this it makes Switzerland a more competitive country and a better place to live.
These three objectives are also in compliance with the company’s overall goals and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. The new strategy retains the earlier objectives in relation to media skills, climate protection, being a responsible employer, maintaining a fair supply chain and a networked Switzerland. The Work Smart initiative is being further promoted in the context of the new environmental objective. Further details on Swisscom’s goals and their implementation will be provided in the 2019 Sustainability Report.