For the first time, Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk has integrated its voluntary corporate reporting to include the social, environmental, and financial performance. The just-released 2004 Annual Report brings together material previously contained in three separate publications, presenting information in a magazine format that features "hot topics" as well as 64 pages of financial and non-financial accounts.
The company deals frankly with key issues facing its business, as well as some industry-specific matters such as transparency of clinical trial data and industry funding of medical education.
In 2004, the company amended its articles of association to specify that the company will ‘strive to conduct its activities in a financially, environmentally and socially responsible way’. It also:
* Developed a climate change strategy, entering a partnership with the global environmental group WWF to achieve an absolute reduction in its carbon dioxide emissions by 2014
* Began road-testing the United Nations Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations, with a view to developing human rights standards
* Established a bonus scheme for its 26 most senior executives that includes performance on key sustainability-driven projects.
* Sold insulin at 20% of the average price in the industrialized world to 33 Least Developed Countries (LDC) — compared to 16 in 2003 — as part of a program to offer more affordably priced insulin to all 49 LDCs.
* Reached an estimated 21 million people worldwide in 2004 through Novo Nordisk’s global health initiatives such as the National Diabetes Programme and DAWN (Diabetes, Attitudes, Wishes and Needs)
