Material issues

Our activities have an impact on our social, ecological and economic en­vi­ron­ment. At the same time, our company is shaped by this en­vi­ron­ment and our stake­hold­ers. Every year, we identify the sustainability issues in this network of relationships that are currently considered relevant or even particularly relevant for our stake­hold­ers and for us. We involve the interest groups in this process. This approach ensures that the strategic focus of our work for us, our stake­hold­ers and our en­vi­ron­ment is consistent and in line with current de­vel­op­ments. For each major topic, we also prepare a management approach, which we include in the relevant chapter of this report.

In 2020, we modified and fleshed out the materiality matrix in line with the responses from the stakeholder surveys and based on the findings of the 2020 benchmarking with ten national and in­ter­na­tional telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­nies.

The increasing im­por­tance of expansion plans relating to the new 5G generation of mobile com­mu­ni­ca­tions in society and with the regulator has had a twofold effect on our materiality matrix: we have moved the topic of mobile com­mu­ni­ca­tions and society accordingly to the top left-hand quadrant and the topic of network expansion to the quadrants of topics that are highly relevant to us. We have also extended the latter’s designation to include network expansion and decommissioning, as we would like to place more emphasis on the decommissioning activities associated with the network strategy, especially the conventional analogue fixed network.

The topic of recycling management is now in the quadrant of very relevant topics. This upgrading resulted from benchmarking and many significant regulatory de­vel­op­ments. The topic of accessibility, on the other hand, was discussed somewhat less intensively in the year under review and we therefore shifted it to the relevant topics quadrant.

Furthermore, in the year under review terminology of the main topics was again simplified and topic-related terminology was con­sol­i­dated. Media competence and the protection of minors in the media were combined and all topics relating to climate protection were subsumed under one term.