Zeon's Sustainability

Creating a truly exciting company

Our most fundamental challenge as a company is to create a workplace where every employee can fully demonstrate their abilities and experience excitement while working; this leads to innovation, the key to our growth. Specific elements include “diversity, inclusion, and belonging (DI&B),” “improvement of job satisfaction and engagement,” and “streamlining and reappraising how we work.”

Providing unique value through innovation

Innovation is the most important keyword for Zeon to grow while meeting societal expectations and we have positioned it as central to the Five Gears. Providing society with value that only our company can create, and that cannot be imitated by others, will lead to the sustainable growth of both society and Zeon. “Creating systems and a culture that foster innovation” and “original technologies, products, and services” are, we believe, the key to keeping all Five Gears turning.

Establishing solid governance

To ensure that “we continue to conduct our business with fairness and integrity and remain a trusted company,” a tenet of the company’s Sustainability Policy, we must strengthen our foundation as a company. This includes not only “management transparency,” “stable and secure production,” “quality,” and “anti-corruption,” but also elements such as “information security,” “sustainable procurement,” and “human rights,” which have come to be recognized as important issues in recent years.

Transforming business structure to respond to social changes

By driving innovation, we will create products and services that meet society’s expectations, and by shifting the focus of our business toward these products and services, we will transform our business structure. From the viewpoint of sustainability, fields such as “digitalization of society,” “advancements in mobility,” and “health and welfare” are areas of high social demand, and by actively bringing innovation mainly in these areas, we will transform our business structure to adapt to social changes.

Contributing to establishing a circular society

A circular society refers to a society in which limited resources are utilized to the maximum extent and environmental impacts are minimized by, for example, promoting recycling and reducing waste. We believe that transforming our business structure by bringing innovation both to our products and services and to how they are produced will contribute to establishing a circular society, and this will in turn help realize our corporate philosophy.

We organized the Five Gears that drive Zeon (materiality) to show the path the company should follow in the future clarifying the relationships among Five Gears.　The Five Gears that drive Zeon are the axis that lets us combine our efforts, without wavering, toward realizing our corporate philosophy even in a rapidly changing business environment.

How to Read and Interpret the Diagram

The diagram below shows examples of specific elements associated with each of the “Five Gears that drive Zeon.” Among these, we consider “creating systems and a culture that foster innovation” and “original technologies, products, and services”, which are elements of the “Providing unique value through innovation” gear, to be particularly important as key elements that keep all five gears moving. Therefore, they are depicted as larger circles in the diagram.

Under our Sustainability Policy, the “Five Gears that drive Zeon (materiality)” represent the key issues we must address to realize our corporate philosophy. In our Medium-Term Business Plan: STAGE30, we have set various KPIs and are carrying out initiatives based on the concept of the “Five Gears that drive Zeon.”

In April 2023, we launched the company-wide, cross-functional Materiality Determination Project consisting of members from various positions and age groups, which discussed material issues for about eight months, and in December 2023, the project determined the Zeon Group’s materiality with the approval of the Board of Directors. We conducted the materiality identification using the following steps.

1. Consideration of concepts and axes

We started to determine our materiality based on the concept of double materiality with two axes: the impact on our finances (financial materiality) and the impact of our actions on society and the environment (sustainability materiality).
Based on general elements, we discussed elements that should be included in the two axes used above taking into account the principles and values Zeon considered important. Specifically, elements that should be emphasized in and added to financial materiality included Zeon’s originality, higher motivation of employees, and the safety and stability of operations, while those for sustainability materiality included employees’ eagerness, the history and milestones of Zeon, and the ideas that were put into the company’s corporate philosophy and business.

To promote sustainability initiatives across the whole company, we have established the “Sustainability Committee.” The Sustainability Committee examines policies and develops and promotes concrete measures to address material sustainability issues, including responses to climate change and human rights issues. In accordance with the characteristics of each issue, we establish theme-specific subcommittees to ensure highly specialized and effective deliberation and response to individual issues.
Matters examined and discussed by the Sustainability Committee are deliberated on and decided by the “Management Committee”, chaired by the Representative Director, and are reported to the Board of Directors as appropriate depending on the importance of the agenda items, thereby ensuring appropriate governance with the involvement of senior management.
In addition, from the perspective of supporting the Company’s sustainable growth, policies and measures related to risk management arising from business operations, environmental conservation, and occupational safety are also examined, planned, and promoted by the relevant committees.

Sustainability Promotion Structure