Our operating philosophy is to produce safe, sustainable steel – and our approach to corporate responsibility has a significant part to play in achieving this. A responsible approach to business guides all our operations, from extracting iron ore, producing steel to shipping the finished product.
We believe our position in the steel and mining industry brings unique responsibilities and opportunities. We have a responsibility to our shareholders to operate profitably, and a responsibility to our stakeholders to do this in an ethical, high quality and transparent manner.
Our corporate responsibility strategy focuses on four areas: investing in our people; making steel more sustainable; enriching our communities and – a value that underpins the first three areas – transparent governance.
Investing in our people
Our people are at the heart of ArcelorMittal. We are inspired by their ideas and rely on their hard work and commitment for the success of our business. We treat them with dignity and respect, invest in their development, and aim to provide them with a safe and healthy working environment.
Enriching our communities
We play an important role in all the markets where we operate, and we want to contribute to the development of strong and sustainable local communities. We do this by being sensitive to local cultures, issues and priorities, by engaging with our communities in an open and transparent way, and by working in partnership with local organisations.
Making steel more sustainable
We are working on technologies that will redefine the steelmaking process, pioneering more sustainable practices, and contributing positively to the challenge of climate change. We work in partnership with our customers and suppliers to help them achieve their environmental goals through our innovative steel products.
Transparent governance
We believe in open and visible governance, grounded in business reality. We take steps to understand the true impact of our operations and our value chain, predict the future consequences, and manage risks consistently across our operations. We have a process in place to engage meaningfully with key stakeholders, and respond in a transparent manner.
Identifying material issues
As part of our commitment to transparent governance, we undertake an annual group-wide materiality assessment to identify the issues that are important to our stakeholders. This insight informs our corporate responsibility programme and reporting. We begin by collating the information we receive from engaging stakeholders such as our employees, communities, investors and suppliers, and also incorporate customer surveys, press coverage and social media feedback.
This gives us a list of stakeholder issues, which we then assess according to their importance for specific stakeholder groups, and their potential impact on our business.
We have published the resulting ‘materiality matrix’ since 2009.
There have been some changes in the materiality matrix since 2011 due to changing stakeholder priorities and refinements to the way we carry out the analysis. The most important issues continue to be safety, environmental management, and employee relations, and these issues are given priority in this report. Emerging issues that have engaged our management more than before, such as gender diversity, have been included within the matrix for the first time as separate topics. We consider the issues in the upper-right segment of the matrix to be the most material, but every issue included in the chart is important; the position of each in the matrix simply represents our understanding of their relative importance to both the company and its stakeholders.
This web-page was part of Deloitte's CR report assurance scope. View Deloitte LLPs assurance statement.