Vodafone Business sees sustainability as a strategic imperative and customer demand
As Vodafone Business sees its customers pushing the boundaries on sustainability, it is taking the same strategy: both as part of its own strategic telecom sustainability imperatives, and also to meet the demands of its customers.
Vodafone Business International serves companies around the world, and sustainability is a common theme for those enterprises, according to David Joosten, interim head, Vodafone Business International (VBI) and regional director for Vodafone Americas and partner markets. Vodafone Business, then, needs to demonstrate that sustainability is one of its priorities as well, in order to win their business.
He called sustainability “a common boardroom theme.”
“Companies, and especially the larger companies, have a very thorough sustainability agenda,” he explained. “They don’t only want to make money, but have very clear guidelines and strategic direction in how they treat the sustainability agenda. … We definitely also have a role to play in how we reduce emissions for ourselves, and for our customers.”
Joosten added: “That agenda is the same, wherever you go, whether you are in the Middle East, or you are in the U.S., in Europe. The accents might be a little bit different, and the speed of going to zero carbon emissions can be a difference,” he acknowledged. “Depending on where you are in the world and the availability of different types of technology, the ambition might differ to some extent, but the ambition is similar across the world.”
Because of that ambition, he explained, Vodafone Business International’s sustainability practices and reporting factor into both its choice of vendors, and how it stacks up in competing for other companies’ business.
“If you look at how we buy, or how other companies buy nowadays, sustainability is definitely a scoring factor into that,” Joosten said, adding: “A lot of companies are quite demanding when it comes to the sustainability portfolio that they buy from the other suppliers, and that goes very far. To be high on the sustainability index for a supplier, you also need to demand that from your sub-contractors and all that, so the scoring of that is quite difficult. Also, the reporting side of things is quite important, so you … cannot just say, ‘we are a very sustainable company,’ but you also need to be able to show that.
Some companies will not even do business with others which don’t score well when evaluated for sustainability practices, he said. Sustainability, he added “is a very, very clear directive that target that organizations give to themselves, but also to the markets where they want to go.”
For Vodafone Business International to succeed with its customers, it has to impose best practices for sustainability as it creates its products and services. That means knowing where its emissions are generated (66% of Vodafone’s are accounted for by its telecom towers, with another 18% coming from data center-related emissions), and cutting down its energy use through the application of smart technology: implementing its own technology to track and monitor energy usage, for instance; reducing its office footprint, and using smart building technology to reduce lighting, heating and water usage when fewer people are occupying the spaces.
“It would be a shame if you are evaluating the good of technology and then selling it, and then not using it yourself,” he said, adding that also, “In anything you do, ROI is absolutely important, especially when you do these types of initiatives.” When VBI analyzes and presents, for example, the life cycle of hardware, Joosten said that it does very detailed return-on-investment analysis, in order to show both the environmental impact and the ROI benefits.
Joosten also said that the circular economy is more prevalent in discussions around IoT in the last two years, than it has been in the past. That means more thought and discussion around recycling of equipment, recycling of devices and reclaiming of the mineral and metals, as well as how much electronic waste is generated through the life cycle. That often means creating not just solutions, but incentives for customers who may otherwise just toss old phones in a drawer.
“Our ambition is to use technology for good, and we’re using our technology and our IP that we’ve created over the years to implement things that matter for the strategic part of the portfolio,” he said.
To view Joosten’s full session from Telco Sustainability Forum as well as additional content from the event, videos are available on-demand here.
