The smallest companies were left behind in the green transition

By: Trademagazin Date: 2024. 06. 05. 11:06

More and more company leaders are aware of the EU’s carbon neutrality goals. The attitude of company managers is still extremely positive regarding sustainability, but they increasingly feel that compliance with the new sustainability rules is a difficulty for them, according to the K&H sustainability index’s first half-year research of this year. Industrial and construction companies are paying more and more attention to reducing their ecological footprint.

K&H has once again published its sustainability index and the comprehensive research that underpins it, which provides an accurate reflection of the sustainability-related efforts of Hungarian companies for the fifth semester now. The index currently stands at 38 points, which means a drop of one point compared to the previous period. Only the attitude sub-index reflecting the attitude towards sustainability rose slightly from 69 to 70 points, all other sub-indexes decreased. Primarily, the attitude of smaller companies with a turnover of between HUF 300 million and HUF 1 billion deteriorated, and they did less in the interest of sustainability.

The researchers measured the highest value of the K&H sustainability index (56 points) among the largest companies with a turnover of over HUF 4 billion. This is the highest value since the beginning of the research, in the first half of 2022.

Among industrial companies, the main index continued to grow and is outstanding (44 points). Agricultural companies slightly corrected the fall of the previous half-year. On the other hand, the index decreased significantly among service and trading companies, and among the latter, 33 points is the lowest sectoral result measured so far.

“Now 98 percent of company managers agree that sustainable operations cannot be evaluated only on a cost basis,” commented Suba Levente, head of sustainability at K&H, on the results of the survey. He added: “pretty much all respondents (93 percent) agree that any company can contribute to common sustainability efforts.”