Hitachi is on a mission to help governments, cities and customers cut carbon. We are doing this by becoming innovators in climate change, helping transform power grids, rail and vehicle fleet depots. Hitachi doesn’t just want to decarbonise others though, we recognise we must decarbonise ourselves.
Hitachi is committed to becoming carbon neutral in all operations by 2030, and to achieving carbon neutrality across our entire value chain by 2050, this includes Scope 3 emissions. This won’t be easy, it will mean working together with all of our 30,000 suppliers in 66 countries around the world. We will also work with and help our suppliers to reduce carbon emissions across their own supply chains. This chain reaction will help improve business performance whilst at the same time help decarbonise the planet.
Yoshiaki Kagata, Chief Procurement Office for Hitachi Ltd, recently outlined how Hitachi would be working with and helping procurement partners from a live event at COP26 in Glasgow.
Addressing procurement partners he said ‘Procurement representing the upstream supply chain of Scope 3 accounts for about 9% of Hitachi's total CO2 emissions. In order to achieve this ambitious goal of carbon neutrality, your active engagement, innovations, commitment, and close collaboration with us are inevitable. How do we work together to achieve these ambitious targets? Hitachi's sales of 81 billion US dollars are supported by 30,000 procurement partners in 66 countries and regions around the world. This is the reason why Hitachi calls you procurement partners, rather than suppliers, based on the idea of growing business together on an equal footing. And in the context of achieving our goal of carbon neutrality, 30,000 procurement partners are critically important to Hitachi.’
He went on to outline how Hitachi would ‘share together’ with their partners as Hitachi cannot accomplish carbon neutrality alone. Indeed Hitachi shared its priorities last year with all its partners. Hitachi’s Sustainable Procurement Guidelines was shared through their group CPOs in July 2021. In this they established a foundation for collective sharing and learning to pave the way to a sustainable future together with partners.
Yoshiaki Kagata went on to outline the importance of dialogue with partners: ‘In our journey towards carbon neutrality, we believe that communication should be a two-way street to create active dialogue, not a one-way street. In fact, we've started to work with our major 800 partners, first by listening to their thoughts, targets, and challenges around environmental activities. One of the main purposes for this event is to listen, learn from climate change innovators and experts in Hitachi's Value-Chain. As a global company, we want to learn from others and also become a shining example to others. This process is a new experience for sustainable efforts.’
This dialogue includes customers, suppliers, and even competitors to Hitachi. To accelerate the race to carbon neutrality, we have to overcome barriers and work together.
‘Lastly, we want to grow together with our partners. We have talked a lot about sustainability challenges, about overcoming problems, investing, but I also want to talk about opportunity. We are in business to contribute to society also by growing our business. These days are a unique opportunity to discover new business opportunities, to bring together our innovation, and create new solutions’.