What is your role at PUMA? 

Simge: I work as an analyst in the Corporate Sustainability team and I’m responsible for sustainability or environmental, social and governance (ESG) ratings, rankings and benchmarks. Today, PUMA is showcased on different platforms by being rated, scored, or ranked for its sustainability disclosure. I analyze the findings, manage an active relationship with those platforms and raise critical aspects to consider in our sustainability journey. I work in collaboration with our colleagues from Supply Chain Sustainability, People & Organization, Compliance, Investor Relations and others to reflect PUMA’s sustainability performance in the best possible way on those platforms.

What goes into achieving these ratings, rankings, and benchmarks? How does it all come together?   Simge: Achieving ratings, rankings, and benchmarks involves various steps. Analysts gather data from PUMA’s public disclosure materials like Sustainability Reports, policies, codes, and handbooks. They use this data to score or rank PUMA based on different criteria. Different factors are considered when looking at PUMA’s performance. For instance, sometimes PUMA’s level of transparency is compared to other brands, or its performance results are evaluated based on industry averages. All in all, sustainability is a team effort, involving collaboration with colleagues from different departments, our suppliers, and partners. This also applies when providing data or answers to sustainability related questionnaires for the ranking platforms.

How many of these ratings, rankings and benchmarks does PUMA participate in? What benefits do these ratings have for PUMA?  

Simge: There are more than thirty platforms that we engage with annually. Some of them are strategically critical as their way of challenging our sustainability performance is indicative in our industry. These are disclosed annually in PUMAs Sustainability report. We feel proud and happy that PUMA’s long-term sustainability efforts continue to be recognised in various benchmarks, ratings, and rankings. For instance, recently, we got a ‘Good’ rating from Good on You. There are very few large brands that have achieved this rating, it’s an important improvement. Or our Supply Chain Sustainability team increased PUMA’s Fashion Transparency Index score. But it doesn’t mean that we can sit back and stop. Sustainability is a never-ending journey!

 

What benefits do these ratings have for PUMA?  

Simge: Ratings and benchmarks benefit PUMA in various ways. They help us learn and grow on our journey towards becoming FOREVER.BETTER. We use these assessments to challenge ourselves and gain insights that lead to concrete actions for improvement. By embracing different perspectives and critical thinking, we identify areas for enhancement.

These tools also enable us to measure our progress, compare our performance with peers, and gauge how we are perceived externally. By leveraging this knowledge, we continually feed our sustainability strategy, key performance indicators, and policies. We listen to stakeholders’ expectations and focus on material topics where we can make a real impact.

 

Why are these ratings important for PUMA?  

Simge: In an increasingly complex world, those ratings, rankings, and benchmarks are crucial to foster transparency and gain a comparative understanding on sustainability performances. Investors, consumers and employees are increasingly interested in the topic of sustainability – we will continue to collaborate with the most relevant industry benchmarks and aim to improve our ratings and rankings further.

 

How can the whole PUMA FAM contribute? 

Simge: We should keep doing what we are already doing; working towards FOREVER.BETTER. and our 10FOR2025 targets together. We know we still have a long way to go on our sustainability journey and we will continue to execute our sustainability strategy step by step, but as I mentioned before – sustainability is a team effort, so we all will have to work together, to be able to meet the expectations coming from our external environment.