ESG News Review 30 August – 5 September 2014

Tesla Motors was among the most praised companies last week as it chose Nevada for its planned “gigafactory,” which should produce batteries to power 500,000 of the company’s electric cars annually and lower the costs of these cars; 6,500 on-site jobs and 16,000 indirect jobs sould be created in the community. Unilever and the World Resources Institute (WRI) announced a new partnership that should increase transparency in agricultural commodity supply chains with the aim to end tropical deforestation. EFG Hermes donated EGP50 million to the EFG Hermes Foundation for Social Development; this donation is targeted towards the sustainable development of several impoverished villages in Upper Egypt. Schneider Electric said it had exceeded its 2014 set target for the number of people trained from new economies in energy management; the energy company has trained 50,000 people, which is 10,000 more than what was envisaged in its BipBop energy access programme for communities at the base of the pyramid. ABB and BYD Co. announced a strategic collaboration that should accelerate the introduction of new solutions for electric vehicle charging.

BP appeared among the most criticized companies last week, as a U.S. federal judge in Louisiana has ruled the company has been “grossly negligent” for the 2010 Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Horizon oil spill; the judge ruled that BP was responsible for two thirds of the blame and will have to pay $18 billion in additional damages, while thirty percent of the blame goes to Transocean and three percent to Halliburton. The European Union fined Infineon, Philips and Samsung a total of €138 million for fixing the prices of smartcard chips in the 2003-2005 period. McDonald’s, Yum! Brands, Inc., and The Wendy’s Company have been facing workers strikes in more than 100 U.S. cities over higher wage claims.

The tag cloud below shows words found in news about these companies.

Words found in news about most praised and most criticized companies last week

This weekly review has been produced using the EthicalQuote reputation index run by Covalence, which tracks 2800 companies worldwide. It gives a summary of positive and negative news published last week about Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG), Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), ethics and sustainability.

The EthicalQuote reputation index integrates thousands of news pieces gathered online and classified according to 50 ESG criteria inspired by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), and to their positive or negative sentiment.

The next heatmap represents the sentiment calculated for each of the 50 criteria last week. The 50 criteria are embedded into 7 dimensions, following the structure of the GRI. The color indicates the ratio of positive news / total news.

Ratio of positive news / total news for 50 criteria last week 0 % 100 %

The map below represents countries where action described in the news takes place, the color reflecting the ratio of positive news / total news for each active country using last week’s data.

Ratio of positive news / total news 0 % 100 %

In terms of volume of information USA, China, Spain, Mexico, France, Germany, India, Japan, Australia, and Canada were the main countries of action.

Last week statistics

These figures show the activity in Covalence EthicalQuote database during the week of 30 August – 5 September 2014.

Historical statistics

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Positives	389494
Negatives	256819
Total	646313
Sources	41184
Start	01.01.2002
End	05.09.2014
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