GRI 2-29, 3-1, 3-3

2022 was a great year for D&L!

The Company emerged from another year of the  pandemic with its strongest corporate performance in history, eclipsing its record net income in 2018.

This was not apparent in January 2022 when Omicron  wreaked havoc through the ranks of management and  staff returning from the Christmas holidays. Thankfully, the Company’s health protocols and relentless drive to  vaccinate stakeholders and their families bore fruit, as most COVID infections at this time were mild and cured  within a week or so. Still, leadership prepared  contingency plans as weakness in sales at the beginning of the year and the continuing supply chain disruptions threatened the hoped-for recovery from the global  pandemic.

In April, the Company’s leaders from across the business,  operations, and support units spent the whole of the Palm Sunday weekend on a Strategic Thinking Workshop.

This laid the groundwork for how the Group  would reshape and refocus its efforts for the rest of the  year, and the near future.

A key theme permeating discussions during the early  part of 2022 was ESG, which McKinsey & Co. defines as:

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG)  criteria [are] useful in measuring a company’s  progress toward achieving social goals in  addition to creating shareholder value.1

With the worst of the pandemic hopefully in the rearview  mirror, external stakeholders such as investors and large  business customers frequently queried the Company on  its ESG policies and commitments, particularly where it  stood on supply chain concerns such as traceability and social impacts, over and above economic and environmental ones, both positive and negative.

By mid-2022, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) released a new set of Universal, Sector, and Topic Standards for all organizations reporting from January 1, 2023 onwards, with a renewed focus on “mandatory human rights-related disclosures”.2

Throughout the year, the Company developed new and  tweaked existing policies and processes. Conversations  vertically across ranks and horizontally across functions  and stakeholder groups led to plans and actions increasingly geared towards good governance and positive impacts, as well as in mitigating risks, non-sustainable outcomes, and negative consequences. ESG filtered into Google Meets, weekly and monthly reports, and informal discussions behind COVID masks.