2013

Sustainability at NHBB is founded upon our mission and values. In the 1990s, we implemented organizational development programs with the aim of enhancing our capabilities as an organization. This entailed transforming the culture, in other words our values and actions, and the structure of our organization in order to strengthen its foundations. We spent several years carrying out various studies and analyzing the current state of the organization and then used the results to establish a mission and values that would serve as guides for doing business. Our mission is "To exceed the expectations of our customers through an empowered organization resulting in profitable growth and world class leadership." Quality, Integrity, Partnerships, A Learning Organization and Social Sensibility are our five values.

One of those values, Social Sensibility, encompasses our environmental responsibilities, civic responsibilities and the health and safety of our employees. These ideas have long been fundamental values of our business and I believe that is why NHBB has been able to keep developing all these years.

Given this history, we do not treat sustainability as a special activity, but rather as inherent to the business process and as part of our corporate culture. We believe that all activities undertaken at plants contribute to sustainability. These include improvements made to cleaning systems to reduce water usage, research into the introduction of solar power generation, learning about best practices overseas and formulation of strategic plans. Sustainability is embodied in our daily actions. We don't tell employees that they need to practice sustainability or carry out CSR activities because the most important part of promoting sustainability is incorporating it into employees' daily actions. By changing the way employees act, we can establish a culture that allows us to push ahead with activities that in 10 years we can look back on and say, "That was for sustainability."