Véronique di Benedetto
Could you explain to us how you are making headway in assessing Econocom’s CSR impact?
Every year we are moving forward, in a pragmatic but visible way, we entertain a realistic vision, in line with our business and our offerings. This is why we are making and will continue to make more and more offers that have a positive impact, enabling our customers and partners to move forward with us, and enabling them to involve us in the challenges that they face.
In 2021 we worked on a comprehensive vision of our carbon footprint with a complete scope 3 thanks to our partner, Greenly, a start-up that developed an automated platform for carbon assessments. Our goal now is to actively reduce all sources of emission, even faster than in the past, by resolutely embracing the circular economy which has long been part of our DNA.
How and to what extent being a global group contributes to this result?
We are both a global group and a group of associated entrepreneurs due to the fact that subsidiaries and satellites have great autonomy. This is also a strength because everyone can contribute to a positive impact and be inspired by the other to move forward. We don't impose everything on everyone, but we make sure that everyone takes up the important issues and can also develop their own solutions according to the business they are in and the country where they work.
What main criteria do you use for measuring impact?
The measurement criteria are defined in part by law but also by each company according to its business. These non-financial performance criteria are increasingly standardized at the European level, in order to make them more easily comparable and verifiable. Nowadays, our criteria are largely focused on internal and external digital responsibility. We are therefore very attentive to the issues and criteria used for decarbonizing the digital technology, and focus on fighting the digital divide, particularly in education and professional integration, and the promotion of women in the digital arena.
Why is it helpful to be a stakeholder in organizations involved in responsible digital technology?
It is important to be part of a chain of knowledge and expertise. No one can act in isolation when it comes to tackling the issue of responsibility and impact; we are part of a chain and each link in the chain must be strong and collaborate with the others to become ever stronger. So we are active in this type of organization, we contribute and seek to learn from other stakeholders.
The company is a trailblazer in the circular economy, what do customers and partners say about it?
Our 2 million end-users and thousands of customers testify to this trust. Of course, not all of them are yet sensitive to the arguments related to the circular economy, which is the only possible avenue in the future to avoid digital waste and meet everyone's needs. To do this, manufacturers, cloud providers and editors must revisit their value chain from upstream (design, manufacturing, development, etc.) to downstream (reconditioning, recycling, etc.) through more economical and responsible uses.
Customers recognize our know-how in this area, but we still need to be more sophisticated in our offers and how we measure their impact, in order to improve our responses to our customers.
This requirement for positive impact goes beyond the circular economy, with the solidarity economy: how the digital world embraces everyone, offering new opportunities in terms of retraining or for people who have been out of work. Circularity implies solidarity!
Could you define your ambition in terms of the impact throughout the group?
We want all our offerings to have a positive impact; we want greater responsibility and impact to guide our investment and acquisition strategy across the company. As a matter of fact, we have acquired a company, which possesses unheard-of expertise in smartphone refurbishment, "made in France" with this goal in mind. This type of choice demonstrates our desire to be even more committed.
We are collectively and individually committed to the daily search for greater impact and utility, for our customers, for society, and for the common good.