Panasonic Named 'Sustainability Leader' to Present Best Practices for Others to Emulate

While many companies are suffering amidst this dipping economy, Panasonic (News - Alert) remains a shining beacon of hope for those who are looking to improve their business practices. The company, along with nine others including Ford and GE, were named “Sustainability Leaders,” and will be presenting best practices for other businesses to heed to remain successful in this cut-throat market.

Less than one-third of today’s largest companies surpassed the 70 percent score defining the “threshold for ‘sustainability leadership’” in the 2012 Tomorrow’s Value Research (TVR), the firm’s annual assessment of corporate sustainability practices. Even more, the report shows that many of last year’s top performers in each category this year fell short of sustainability leadership. All-in-all, only ten percent of companies, such as Panasonic, scored higher than 70 percent.

TVR explains how among the top 10 – which also boasts Citibank, HSBC, Hyundai and Repsol – Panasonic sets a target for categories such as climate change and environment, water and supply chain. “Companies are increasingly aware of sustainability issues and actively integrate sustainability into core business strategy and decision-making…however, as they become more responsive to the Global Reporting Initiative sustainability reporting guidelines and other reporting frameworks, they are failing to adequately put their performance into context,” Environmental Leader recently reported about the results.

This research, which has been conducted now for nine years, examines sustainability programs among the 25 largest companies based on revenue in each of these three regions: The Americas, Asia/Australia and Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). Additionally, the report revealed that healthcare was the worst performing sector in the study, scoring an average of only 19 percent.

In last year’s TVR report, Two Tomorrows, its sustainability advisor, explained that Panasonic was among the top companies most deserving of their top places within sustainability rankings. As mentioned earlier, GE was interestingly the only other company listed along with Panasonic last year (which also included HP, Intel (News - Alert), Nike and Siemens) to have made the 2012 list, only further proving how prestigious this honor is and how deserving and hard-working Panasonic is to receive it.