An Aditya Birla Group Commitment 61 Insider View Taking a value chain approach We foresee a consolidation of transparent value chains around the biggest brands. Being part of a sustainable supply chain will increasingly become a prerequisite of a sustainable business. We must increasingly apply our Sustainability Model to our supply chains, understanding the areas of greatest impact but also identify those that are vulnerable to the same external factors that we ourselves must adapt to. To ensure that we are driving sustainable business practices uniformly across our value chains, we need to transform the traditional auditing processes to ones based on transparent self-assessment on sophisticated IT platforms. We have started by allowing our businesses to use the IT system that we have rolled out to manage and benchmark their own performance and thus make their own action plans for improvements. We have made an excellent start, standardising the thinking of our subject matter experts into supporting our businesses in their self-assessments and helping to enlighten our business leaders across the Group. This not only focuses the responsibility on the site and business management but it is highly efficient, standardised and cost effective. By using this thinking across our value chain we will be able to multiply the effect of our programme by supporting small and medium enterprises that often do not have the resources needed to raise their standards The future is sustainable Increasingly the goals and work of the Group Sustainability Cell will be to bring scientific knowledge to our strategy discussions. At the Aditya Birla Group, we are working to make sure that our up and coming managers and business leaders embrace the need to learn about and understand the trends in our external factors and to incorporate them into their thinking, planning and business strategies. As this happens, I am confident that across the Group we will find solutions to help us build sustainable businesses that contribute to a sustainable India and a sustainable world. Tony Henshaw Group Chief Sustainability Officer