Each year, the Group updates the analysis to identify social, environmental, governance and economic topics that are material (the “materiality analysis”) for all of the Group’s significant internal and external stakeholders in order to recognise long-term value creation challenges and opportunities. The 2021 analysis began by revising the 2020 materiality matrix, taking into consideration the Group’s strategic goals and external trends aimed at pre-empting emerging topics that will need to be handled in order to remain competitive. The process of updating the priority topics for the Group, built with a bottom-up approach (starting from the analysis of the information gathered from the subsidiaries), included the following activities:

The methodology used to group the data gathered by the companies considered: the company’s materiality and size, the number of external stakeholders involved and the organisational weight of consulted management. The materiality matrix set out below shows the top right section of the overall matrix depicting the perceived relevance for stakeholders (vertical axis) compared with the relevance for the Group (horizontal axis), considering the impacts incurred and generated externally.

The topic “People’s safety: values, technology and culture” was material for all companies that contributed to the matrix. However, it was not included in the combined matrix because, as reiterated many times by the CEO, “there are no limits to maintenance and safety, nor should there be any”. Accordingly, the topic was not included in the materiality matrix as it applies to all companies and has absolute priority over all other topics in management’s view.

(1) Furthermore, in its daily operations, the Group also contributes to the achievement of other SDGs not associated with material topics.