As an international trade and services group, we pursue sustainable development in all corporate areas. This is a central component of our corporate mission statement. We want to set global standards for human interaction, a healthy environment, and a diverse society. This is the only way in which we can reconcile our growth-oriented strategy in the long term with value-oriented sustainable handling and ensure quality of life for future generations. At the end of 2019, the shareholders also sharpened a shareholder vision for the Otto Group: “Responsible Commerce that inspires”. Sustainability is thus brought even more into the focus of the entire Group and will guide the actions of every employee.
More specifically: The Otto Group takes responsibility for its activities, which also means looking at the whole value chain. This describes the path that our products take, right from the extraction and processing of raw materials, through manufacturing the finished product, its sales and distribution and finally its use and disposal by consumers. With this integrated approach we are able to align all of our core business processes in a sustainable way by identifying the social and environmental impacts of our business activities. From this we derive strategies and effective measures, and implement these with effective management systems. For example, our Textile Strategy aligns Group-wide goods purchasing more strongly with environmentally friendly raw material sourcing, such as sustainable cotton.