Adidas has undergone a very positive ESG (environmental, social and governance) evaluation conducted by the ratings agency Standard & Poor’s (S&P), receiving a score of 85/100. It is the most recent of the 27 companies to obtain a public ESG profile, and the only one in the sports industry. By comparison, the next five most recent evaluations cover Air France-KLM (64/100), IPB Insurance (73/100), EP Infrastructure (66/100), Danone (85/100) and Gruppo Hera (81/100).
S&P has been conducting ESG evaluations for less than two years. Its method stems from that of SAM ESG Ratings and Benchmarking, which S&P acquired from RobecoSAM in January 2020. This gave S&P control of the SAM Corporate Sustainability Assessment (CSA), an annual evaluation of corporate sustainability.
The evaluation breaks down into four parts, each with constituent parts: an environmental profile (greenhouse gas emissions, waste and pollution, water use, land use and biodiversity, general factors), a social profile (workforce and diversity, safety management, customer engagement, communities, general factors), a governance profile (structure and oversight, code and values, transparency and reporting, financial and operational risks, general factors), and a preparedness summary (capabilities, embeddedness). Adidas scored 79/100 on the first three together and earned a further six points on preparedness, for a total of 85/100.
