ESG Development in Consumer Staples & Healthcare update

This week, we are continuing with the updates we’ve been making to our ESG Development Heatmaps, focusing this time on the Consumer Staples and Healthcare sectors. As we have done before, we only focused on (1) companies listed in the Mexican Stock Exchange and (2) publicly disclosed materials.

Consumer Staples

Healthcare

What can we read from these heatmaps?

1. There was little progress over 2020 in terms of ESG Strategy maturity in either sector. There was only 1 change in Consumer Staples (Soriana establishing an ESG committee) and things were pretty unchanged in Healthcare.
2. In terms of ESG Communication
3. Gigante provided some additional color on environmental efforts, with now the entire Consumer Staples sector having information available on this topic.
4. Kimber and Walmex started reporting SASB indicators (representing 33% of the Consumer Staples sector).
5. Soriana published a GRI-aligned sustainability report, meaning now 5 out of the 6 Consumer Staples companies are formally producing sustainability or integrated reports (vs. 4 out of 6 in 2019).
6. Genomma Lab verified externally its sustainability report this year (making it the first company in healthcare to formally do so).

These sectors are relatively small and especially in Healtchare there are companies that are very thinly traded and therefore not very focused on meeting global investor demands. For this reason, as we’ve said in the past, it is likely we will continue to see progress just focused on specific names.

The Consumer Staples sector will continue to stand out as one of the sectors with the best ESG Communication effort given its exposure to the end consumer (and how consumer expectations on sustainability topics have shifted), and hopefully we will see more efforts to disclose more detailed things (using SASB, and eventually seeing TCFD analyses). We would expect Healthcare will remain bifurcated between the companies who have more active investor relations efforts (Genomma, Medica Sur) and are therefore likely to make progress on this front, and the companies that are not.

I hope you found this interesting. As usual, if there is anything we can help you with, or if there is an ESG topic you would like to know more about, please let us know.

Best,

Marimar

CEO, Miranda ESG