As part of our commitment to transparent reporting, Philip Morris International (PMI) completed a thorough assessment of its business sustainability practices and performance through EcoVadis, the global standard for business sustainability ratings, which has rated over 125,000 companies around the world.
The assessment includes 21 sustainability criteria across four core themes: Environment, Labor & Human Rights, Ethics, and Sustainable Procurement.
Our 2024 rating places PMI in the top three percent of companies who have completed the assessment globally, which demonstrates our progress toward our ambitious sustainability aspirations. This recognition sits alongside our recent CDP triple-A rating across forest, climate, and water disclosures.
PMI values and strives for transparent reporting. We closely follow the development of global reporting standards, particularly with suppliers and third-party partners in our supply chain. Our supply chain connects us with millions of people, from the farmers and farmworkers who cultivate our tobacco and other agricultural products to workers at the supplier companies that provide the products and services we need to run our business. We are proud of our progress in engaging with suppliers on our sustainability journey, and this recognition from EcoVadis ensures that we will continue in our efforts to further enhance suppliers’ capabilities and performance.
EcoVadis’s business sustainability ratings are based on international sustainability standards, such as the Ten Principles of the UN Global Compact, the International Labour Organization (ILO) conventions, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) standards, and the ISO 26000 standard. The ratings provide an evidenced-based analysis on performance and an actionable roadmap for continuous improvement.
PMI has a significant global supply chain, and we are committed to sourcing sustainably from all our critical suppliers. Our approach to sustainable supply chain management is set out in our Responsible Sourcing Principles (RSPs), which define expectations for our suppliers, as well as their suppliers. When partnering with our suppliers, we engage extensively with them so that they embed our RSPs in their operations. From contractual obligations including ongoing training and regular assessments, we work with suppliers to ensure their practices live up to our RSPs. We are supporting RSP compliance through our supplier due diligence programs by applying the EcoVadis methodology. We believe that standardizing methodologies and tools can accelerate decarbonization and we will continue encouraging our suppliers to disclose their sustainability data through common platforms such as EcoVadis, CDP, and the Responsible Business Alliance (RBA). We are proud to receive this rating from EcoVadis, and look forward to further progress in this work.
Consistent and effective management of sustainability practices is critical to our business and society. The EcoVadis process validates our sustainability aspirations, practices, and performance, and offers insights on where we need to focus our attention.
Participating in such an assessment helps us assess our sustainability performance, benchmark ourselves against our peers, and, most importantly, identify areas for improvement on which we can act when they can meaningfully contribute to improving our company’s performance in line with our sustainability strategy.
In addition, and as part of our aspiration to have 100 percent of our critical spend sourced from sustainable suppliers, we engage with our suppliers to onboard them onto the EcoVadis platform, further enabling transparency and information-sharing across the supply chain.
With over 26,000 tier-1 suppliers globally, our supply chain accounts for a significant portion of our potential social and environmental risks and opportunities. We continuously collaborate with our value chain partners to identify and manage these risks and opportunities responsibly. As part of this, we make a concerted effort to work with our suppliers and build mutual capabilities in order to accelerate our respective sustainability journeys. EcoVadis helps to enable this work—and to receive this recognition from the platform further energizes us to continue transparently delivering on our sustainability aspirations in partnership with our suppliers.
