Volvo Car Corporation issues 2011/12 Corporate Report With Sustainability

Volvo Car Corporation issues 2011/12 Corporate Report With Sustainability

Volvo Car Corporation today issued its 2011/12 Corporate Report with Sustainability. The report addresses areas within, and issues related to, sustainability that are important to Volvo Car Corporation's stakeholders and gives an overview of developments with the company's various sustainable development programmes. This year's report is the eleventh edition and can be downloaded in PDF format here.

Erica Wikman, Director of Sustainability Communication at Volvo Car Corporation said: "It's very encouraging to see the great progress Volvo Car Corporation made over the past year in our never ending strive towards sustainable mobility. With all the efforts and innovative work going on in the company in the area of social and environmental responsibility, the potential for further improvements looks very promising."

Some key achievements in the past year:

Promoting environmental sustainability

• The EU fleet average CO₂ level is now down to 151 g/km a reduction of an additional 4 percent. In five years Volvo Car Corporation has improved with over 20 percent. The latest addition to this is the V40 D2 with CO₂ emissions of 94g/km.
• The V60 Plug-in Hybrid will be ready for delivery to its initial customers towards the end of 2012 and a fleet of fully battery-powered C30 Electric is on the road.
• Over the past five years Volvo Car Corporation has in total reduced its energy consumption by 30%.
• The factories in Sweden and Belgium only use electricity from renewable resources, which has lead to the plants cutting their CO₂ emissions in half since 2008.
• The One tonne life project, initiated by Volvo Car Corporation together with other partners, was finalised. The greatest improvements achieved by the family in the project were within transportation and power consumption. The transportation CO₂ emissions were reduced by more than 90 percent, where the family's Volvo C30 electric played a major role.
• The basis for future Volvo cars is defined with the announcement of a Scalable Product Architecture. Combined with a new four-cylinder engine strategy and electrification, this opens up for technical solutions that will make Volvo Car Corporation among the industry leaders in terms of fuel efficiency.

Assuming Social Responsibility

• Improved results in safety tests - the share of independent safety tests where Volvo Car Corporation received the highest ranking in now at 89%.
• Successful road train tests were conducted in 2011 in the EU SARTRE project (Safe Road trains for the Environment). Volvo Car Corporation is the only carmaker participating in the project, which is now in its final phase.
• The new V40 was premiered with the world first Pedestrian Airbag Technology.
• Volvo Car Corporation's ambitious plan for the future has lead to an increase of the number of employees with about 2000 in the past year.
• Sick leave continued to decrease to the all-time low level of 4.4% per available hours.

Creating value

• Volvo Car Corporation has established a new corporate strategy - Designed around you. This is now the foundation for the business, products and corporate culture.
• Global sales increased by 20.3% and the company saw growth in all sales regions during 2011 with 449,255 cars sold in total.
• The full year 2011 presented a profit of 1,636 MSEK.
• In the 2011 Employee Survey, the results for "Employee Loyalty" and "How attractive Volvo Car Corporation is as an employer" increased sharply compared to 2010 with an improvement of 19%.
• The volume target is to sell 800,000 cars in 2020. The growth strategy for the Chinese market is vital to achieve this target and the presence in China has grown significantly over the past year.  

More information can be found on www.volvocars.com/sustainability.