Interfax publishes final Fundamental Efficiency Rating for top 150 Russian, Kazakh cos

The Interfax Group has published its final annual Fundamental Efficiency Rating for businesses in Russia and Kazakhstan, which is compiled by environmental and energy rating agency Interfax-ERA and includes the 150 largest Russian and Kazakh companies from the real sector of the economy.

All the top 10 companies are Russia-based: Gazprom Dobycha Urengoi LLC, JSC Zlatoust Steel Mill, PJSC Alrosa , Gazprom Dobycha Yamburg LLC, Gazprom Transgaz Ukhta LLC, JSC Helicopters of Russia, PJSC T Plus , PJSC IDGC of Center & Volga , JSC Kemerovo Azot and PJSC Uralkali .

The leader among companies from Kazakhstan is the local branch of Karachaganak Petroleum Operating B.V., which came 26th in the overall ranking.

The ratings for the companies are divided into 11 broader industry categories depending on the type of technological processes they employ, however for the first time these are broken down into more than 40 subgroups. The structure of companies within a subgroup is more uniform, the companies ranked have more technological similarities and assessment within a subgroup is as close as possible to benchmarking - a sectoral comparison of efficiency.

This year, the concluding phase of preparation of the final rating coincided with a presentation of a joint project on environmental protection titled "Ecological and Energy Ratings: Saving the Earth" by Interfax and the Russian Social Ecological Union (RSEU) at the Paris Peace Forum on November 12-13. The forum was attended by 30 heads of state and more than 130 official delegations. The project ranked among the 100 best internationally tested Governance Tools, and can be used by banks, investment funds and development institutions as a responsible financing tool.

"Following the news that our project had been presented at the Paris forum, several major Russian companies decided to disclose environmental and energy performance data for their key enterprises in a bid for inclusion in the rating," said Alexander Martynov, project leader and head of the Interfax-ERA environmental and energy rating agency.

"The ratings give society, business and the state a comprehensible, graphic way of monitoring a company's social and environmental responsibility. The headline measurement coherence and precision of the characteristics - the energy efficiency and environmental impact - make the rating simple to grasp and therefore a convenient tool for drafting governance decisions," he said.

"The fundamental efficiency rating and related benchmarking make it possible for parent companies not just to compare enterprises within a holding but also to use it to perform a broader assessment of their own suppliers and partners. Investment companies as well as commodities firms are interested in that opportunity today. In GRI Standards, such comparisons of suppliers are known as supply chain responsibility," Martynov said.

As in the past, companies in the top 150 rating are ranked according to five criteria: energy resource efficiency - energy and resource expenditure per unit of output; technological efficiency - consumption of resources and generation of waste per unit of work; ecosystem efficiency - level of pollution and environmental impact by a company's enterprises that can be assimilated by the local natural ecosystems; change in efficiency, from 2005 to 2019; and transparency - level of disclosure about energy and resource consumption and environmental impact.

Companies are ranked by each of the criteria and the final ranking is determined according to the sum of their places in the five separate rankings.

Users of the interfax-era.ru site can judge the leaders and outsiders among small and medium businesses as well as large enterprises for each type of industry, sector or activity.

Ratings are compiled on the basis of questionnaires completed by companies themselves, or data from public non-financial reporting, tariff rationales, public statements and declarations and company websites, as well as registers disclosed by executive bodies and certain public organizations, for example the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs and WWF Russia. Interfax's information systems - SPARK, SPARK-Management and SCAN - are important sources of fundamental information about most companies.

The active involvement of companies from Kazakhstan in the project was the result of constructive partnership with business in the Eurasian Economic Union framework, brokered by Association of Environmental Organizations of Kazakhstan.

The full version of the Top 150 and methodology for compiling it can be found at: https://interfax-era.ru/reitingi/2019.