ESG Development in Materials update

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

Materials

What can we read from this heatmap?

1. There were three new materiality assessments done during the year (Cemex, Alpek, and Cydsa).
2. Public disclosure of ESG KPIs and KPI goals has slightly improved, but there is still no company within the sector with a complete set of KPIs for all its material topics.
3. Two new companies mapped their contributions to the Sustainable Development Goals (Collado and Cydsa).
4. One new company in the sector published a TCFD-aligned analyses (Tenaris, joining Cemex as the second company to do so). Alpek started to dig into it but hasn’t published a full analysis yet.
5. One additional company aligned with Science Based Targets (Cemex), joining GCC.
6. Vitro joined Alpek and Cemex in their alignment with CDP.
7. One new Company, Alpek, became a signatory of the UN’s Global Compact. This means that now more than half (53%) of the sector is a signatory.
8. Cydsa improved and formalized its ESG reporting by publishing its sustainability report. With this, 59% of the sector published ESG or integrated reports for 2020.
9. SASB became slightly more popular, with Alpek and Tenaris implementing these standards completely, and Pochteca partially. Nevertheless, only 18% of the sector is reporting SASB standards so far.

We saw good progress in the sector, but this was concentrated in just a handful of companies. The most advanced companies in their ESG strategies and communication are still cement companies, which we believe is partly related to their carbon-intensive production process. There are still many companies in the group that are not really doing anything about ESG yet (or if they are doing it, they are not publicly disclosing it). Clearly companies with more liquid stocks, public debt, and a wide investor base (like Cemex or Alpek) have much stronger incentive to take ESG seriously than those that are quasi-private. So, to the extent a sector has lots of semi-private companies, its ESG scores can expected to be negatively impacted.

It will be interesting to see how regulatory pressure for net zero carbon emission targets, the carbon market, and carbon taxing play a role in these companies’ strategies over time. This, of course, accompanied by investors raising the bar every year on their expectations for ESG plans.

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