PROTECTING the small and medium enterprises from natural disasters is key to a sustainable value chain and attaining business continuity, the SM group said.
“Empowering supply chain is particularly close to our hearts because SM’s roots were borne from our father’s entrepreneurial spirit,” Hans T. Sy, director at mall operator SM Prime Holdings Inc. and adviser to the Sy family’s holding firm SM Investments Corp., said.
Sy is the SMIC’s appointed adviser who participated in the United Nations Global Compact-Global Reporting Initiative regional sustainability summit held in Manila on Tuesday.
SM Prime has also provided free storage data to serve as the repository for documents essential to early recovery and business continuity.
To date, there are over 1,500 SMEs which have availed themselves of this service.
The SM group works with nearly 25,000 small and medium enterprises, both directly and indirectly, representing 27 percent of total SMEs in the Philippines. These are SM’s mall tenants, traders and suppliers mainly in retail.
SM has integrated three platforms in terms of its operations and sustainability to include investing 10 percent of its capital expenditure on disaster resilient features depending on a mall’s existing hazards; capacity building and collaboration and public-private partnerships at the global, regional and national levels.
“Through these efforts, we seal our commitment in creating a more equitable and progressive environment for business partnerships for generations to come,” Sy said.
Ayala’s take
On the other hand, Ayala Corp. chairman and CEO Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala, who also attended the summit, said there should be special emphasis on integrating sustainability in business strategies.
“We designed a long-term Sustainability Blueprint that lays out actionable and measurable targets that address critical environmental, social, and governance gaps that the country faces today. It is specifically designed to support the achievement of the UNSDGs by 2030 that will enable us to be more deliberate in monitoring and evaluating our sustainability targets and allocate resources to these initiatives more appropriately,” Zobel said.
In April 2019, the company launched the Ayala Sustainability Blueprint, a framework that allows each business unit to champion specific United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDG), with an end goal to make significant impact in sectors that would benefit the most.
Image credits: Nonie Reyes