The Taiwan Monthly

ESG

TWSE holds talks at Asia Sustainability Reporting Summit 2019, Taiwan’s industries shine in Asia Sustainability Reporting Awards

The Asia Sustainability Reporting Summit 2019 was held in Singapore on September 4 and 5. The Summit was hosted by Singapore’s CSRWorks which has long been dedicated to sustainability issues and is committed to delivering the value of a sustainable strategy through social networks and events. The Asia Sustainability Report Summit 2019 and Asia Sustainability Reporting Awards hosted by CSRWorks are widely popular among Asian companies and relevant organizations. The Asia Sustainable Report Awards, which have been held since 2015, are international awards for CSR reports issued by Asian companies. The awards encourage Asian companies to devote efforts to the preparation of CSR reports, in order to achieve mutual learning and promote the common good of enterprises and society. Asia’s Report of the Year 2018 was awarded to Taiwan’s Sinyi Realty. This year, five companies in Taiwan have received awards among the 19 awards, namely Sinyi Realty, Cathay Financial Holdings, Taishin Financial Holdings, CTBC Financial Holding, and Asus; and two companies were awarded Asia's Top Sustainability Superwomen, namely Cathay Financial Holdings’ Chief Investment Officer Sophia Cheng and CSRone Reporting Platform’s Founder and President Gennie Yen. Hair O'right International Corporation, which was invited to the briefing, won the warm applause of the attendees for its implementation of the green concept.

 

The organizer invited Tim Mohin, CEO of Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), and Dr. Madelyn Antoncic, CEO of Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), to give remarks at the opening ceremony of the 2019 Summit. GRI CEO Tim Mohin said in his opening speech that in recent years, Asian companies have been increasingly focusing on sustainability reports, and the quality of their reports has also elevated significantly. Tim Mohin took Taiwan as an example, through TWSE’s promotion, the quantity and quality of Taiwan’s reports’ have set benchmarks for Asian countries to promote sustainability.

 

The theme of this year's summit is "Sustainability reporting: is mandatory better?". The Summit positioned Taiwan and Thailand as ASIA's Sustainability Tigers as well as inviting the TWSE to hold talks at the Summit and share experience related to promoting sustainable development in Taiwan. The Senior Vice President of TWSE’s Corporate Governance Department, Pony Huang mentioned in the talks that 345 listed companies had compiled CSR reports by the end of 2018, and more than half of the reports had been assured, which is a high percentage. The TWSE has established regulations aligned with international practices, organized relevant promotion conferences and education training in cooperation with various agencies, and compiled sustainability indices with international index companies through the corporate governance evaluation system, together with the power of the supply chain, effectively improving the quality of Taiwan’s CSR reports. In addition, in 2018, 21 listed companies in Taiwan were selected for the DJSI Emerging Markets or Global Index. The number of the selected companies and their weighting ranked first in the emerging markets, while two companies, ASE Group and Delta Electronics, were selected as Industry Leaders. Apart from that, in the FTSE4GOOD ESG index and MSCI ESG Leaders index, Taiwan's weighting is one of the best in the emerging markets, showing that the efforts of Taiwan's enterprises to promote sustainable development are internationally recognized.

 

The Summit was attended by nearly 300 scholars, experts, companies, NGOs and government representatives who are concerned about sustainability issues; they discussed new trends and technologies for sustainable reporting and investigated the challenges and successful cases at the two-day Summit. The importance of ESG information to risk management and stakeholder communication has been widely recognized by all parties. Most of the attendees believe that the biggest challenge in the future lies in ESG information comparability and reliability. The TWSE will observe the development of international reporting practices and continuously enhance the quality of Taiwan's CSR reports.

 

For further inquiries, please contact Ms. Huang at 0819@twse.com.tw .