NIKE, Inc. Introduces New Targets Elevating Sustainable Innovation Within Business Strategy

NIKE, Inc. (NYSE:NKE) today released its FY10-11 Sustainable Business Performance Summary which introduces its new targets and outlines its progress against key business, labor and environmental goals. The company also discusses the key challenges and its strategy for its work ahead, demonstrating its commitment to a more transparent and sustainable future.

Nike’s long-term strategic vision – to decouple profitable growth from constrained resources – is underscored by new targets and commitments, including a company-wide commitment to further integrate sustainability principles into its innovation processes, governance and portfolios. The work ahead is structured in two levels: continuous improvement targets against key impact areas to “make today better” and broader innovation commitments to “design the future” that establish how Nike is approaching longer-term change.

“Nike is known globally for our innovative performance products and sustainability has now increasingly become core to our business approach,” said NIKE, Inc. President & CEO Mark Parker. “We have continuously invested in reducing our environmental and social impacts within our own business and supply chain and have made substantial gains over the last decade. We know we cannot achieve our bold sustainability goals simply by delivering incremental improvements. We need to deliver innovations that rapidly evolve the way things are done at Nike, in our industry and throughout business.”

Nike also unveiled its new factory rating system, the Manufacturing Index, which looks comprehensively at a contract factory’s total performance and includes a deeper look at how a factory approaches sustainability. This Index elevates labor and environmental performance alongside traditional supply chain measures of quality, cost and on-time delivery.

Within the overall Manufacturing Index, the company has developed an innovative Sourcing & Manufacturing Sustainability Index (SMSI) which assesses contract factory performance on sustainability measures including measures of lean, environmental performance (including water, energy and carbon, and waste), health and safety, and labor management factors. After more than two years of development work and concluding a successful pilot program, the SMSI is currently being rolled out across NIKE, Inc.’s global supply chain.

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