Spotlight on sustainability

  Disclosures unrelated to the management report (unaudited), preliminary remarks

For more than 20 years, sustainability has been a differentiating factor for DHL Group. We view engaging in sustainable business practices as an opportunity first and foremost. The long-term success of our company also depends greatly on the degree to which we meet the needs of our key stakeholder groups and minimize the environmental impact of our business. When we introduced our Strategy 2030 in September 2024, we added a fourth bottom line – “Green Logistics of Choice” – to our three existing strategic bottom lines of being an “Employer, Provider and Investment of Choice”. This firmly anchors our sustainability roadmap (ESG Roadmap), established in 2021, into our Group strategy.

Our strategic approaches are geared towards minimizing the impact of our business activities on climate and the environment, providing a safe and motivating working environment and ensuring transparent and legally compliant business practices throughout the Group. These approaches will enable us to leverage opportunities from sustainability while avoiding risks and making significant progress towards our action plans. Looking back at the year under review, we can point to the following accomplishments:

• We consistently advanced the decarbonization of our business activities, the main decarbonization lever being the use of sustainable fuels in our air transport activities. Through strategic partnerships with transport partners and long-term purchase agreements with suppliers, we have succeeded in increasing the use of sustainable aviation fuels in our own fleet to 3.5%, despite the continued low availability of such fuels. This puts us well above the average for the logistics industry. We are also making good progress as regards other forms of transport and our buildings. More than 40% of our pick-up and delivery fleet consists of e-vehicles, and we are decarbonizing our long-haul routes by using sustainable fuels in addition to starting to use e-trucks. In our buildings, we are expanding the use of solar power to generate electricity. We are expanding our GoGreen product line to enable customers to actively reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
• Our employees, who show great motivation and engagement in fulfilling our customers’ wishes, are the basis for our sustainable success. As an “Employer of Choice”, we offer our employees an inclusive workplace and a healthy and safe work environment, thus reinforcing their loyalty to DHL Group. Our myShares stock option plan, which we will be gradually rolling out worldwide, gives our employees the opportunity to participate directly in the success of our company. We empower women to take up leadership positions and are steadily increasing the share of women in management. Our accident rate (lost time injury frequency rate, LTIFR) is also on the decline thanks to the actions implemented. As concerns our goal of being an “Employer of Choice”, our efforts have already paid off. DHL Express was awarded the title of “World’s Best Employer” in 2024, and other divisions were awarded the title of “Great Place to Work” in various countries.
• In line with our aspiration of being a role model for good business conduct in the logistics industry, both our management and our employees exercise the necessary caution in all of their actions. We offer compliance training to assist them in implementing good business conduct practices in their daily work. Our cybersecurity performance was measured by BitSight, an independent cybersecurity rating agency, and awarded the highest rating category.

Our sustainability focus lies on putting our action plans into motion and improving our management concept. Our management concept remains unchanged following the results of the materiality assessment (double materiality assessment – DMA) reviewed for this report, i.e. the existing steering-relevant performance indicators and targets will be continued unchanged and pursued with determination.

We incorporate our sustainability targets systematically into our internal management processes, considering them when making decisions on investments, acquisitions (M&A) or operational matters.

During the reporting year, we additionally focused on implementing the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) as the reporting framework for our Nonfinancial Statement. This allows for compliance with the requirement to publish a sustainability statement as set forth in the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). Application of the new framework means that this Sustainability Statement contains considerably more data than in previous years, as required by the ESRS, even if we don’t necessarily consider all of that data to be meaningful and relevant. That is one of the reasons why we continue to pursue and support the development of uniform global standards for sustainability, another reason being that this would enable us to compare our progress against that of our global competitors. We are therefore working with EFRAG as well as with the International Sustainability Standards Board on the development of both European and global sustainability reporting standards.