Hankook, Nokian, Pirelli earn Dow Jones sustainability honours

New York — Leading tire makers Hankook Tire & Technology Co. Ltd., Nokian Tyres plc and Pirelli & C. SpA are among the companies named to the 2020 Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI), which serves as a benchmark for evaluating a company's sustainability.

Launched in 1999, the DJSI tracks the stock performance of the world's leading companies in terms of economic, environmental and social criteria. The annual analysis covers more than 7,300 companies and about 95% of the capitalisation of the global market.

This year's DJSI World list included 323 companies, which accounts for 12.7% among the top 2,540 global companies

Finland's Nokian Tyres scored a perfect 100 on the index's ‘product quality & recall management’, ‘environmental reporting’, ‘environmental policy & management’ and ‘social reporting’ categories. This is the fourth consecutive year Nokian has made the DJSI. It also earned a spot on the "more strictly defined" DJSI Europe index.

"We are proud to show leadership in sustainability and to receive this acknowledgement," president and CEO Jukka Moisio said, adding that in the past six years, Nokian Tyres has cut CO2 emissions from production by 44% and reduced the rolling resistance of Nokian tires by 8% on average, which equals to the exhaust fumes of 65,000 cars annually.

This past May 2020, Nokian became the first tire company to have its Science Based Targets for decreasing CO2 emissions officially approved.

Pirelli earned a score of 84, compared with the ‘automobiles & components’ sector average of 35.

"The confirmation of Pirelli's world leadership on the Dow Jones indices acknowledges once again the value of integrating sustainability into our company's development strategy," Marco Tronchetti Provera, executive vice chairman and CEO, said.

For South Korea's Hankook Tire, this is its fifth straight year in the DJSI World ranking and it has the distinction of being the only Asian company in the auto components industry to be listed.

Hankook said it was recognised for its excellence in areas of social contribution and supply-chain management. Hankook has set up seven specialized corporate-social responsibility committees through which the company is sharing the vision of sustainability with all employees in order to further improve CSR initiatives on a companywide level.

Among CSR projects that Hankook has launched is an endangered species protection project in Daejeon, South Korea, to support biodiversity management and ecosystem restoration.