Sustainable and Fair Procurement

The sustainability of our business activities is revealed not only by their direct environmental and social effects. Upstream processes like the procurement of goods and services must also be considered.

What do we buy?

The majority of the procurement volume at the Casinos Austria and Austrian Lotteries Group stems from our core business: lottery products like scratch-off tickets, betting slips, etc. and slot machines and gaming materials for our casinos and WINWIN outlets. The expansion of the food and beverage services in our casinos and WINWIN outlets has also led to an increase in the procurement of food products.

We buy locally

Our goal is to ensure that our procurement activities are sustainable and fair. To achieve this, we buy goods locally wherever possible and give due consideration in our procurement activities to ecological and social criteria like environmental sustainability, energy efficiency, resource conservation and respect for human rights.

In 2017, we purchased 94% of our procurement volume from Austrian suppliers and a further 5% from European sources. However, if this analysis were to be extended beyond supplier origin to include the upstream value chain, these figures would probably differ quite significantly. In line with our CSR Strategy 2020, we intend in future to gather more data in this field.

Code of Conduct for Suppliers

To ensure that our suppliers also conduct their business in line with our understanding of sustainability, we published a new Code of Conduct for Suppliers in 2017. This code can be accessed by suppliers via our Procurement Portal and comes into force upon signing of the contract.

Requirements of our Code of Conduct for Suppliers:

• Employee protection and working conditions pursuant to the provisions in the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) base code
• Environmental protection and efficient use of resources based on established management systems (ISO 14001, EMAS)
• Adherence to general rules of conduct including those related to compliance topics like anti-corruption and data protection

To ensure suppliers comply with our requirements, our Procurement and Compliance Departments introduced a supplier analysis process in 2017. All our suppliers are now analyzed using a Dow Jones Risk and Compliance database, thus allowing us to categorize them into risk groups based on entries in this database regarding worldwide sanctions for money laundering and corruption as well as negative reports in the media regarding environmental and social issues.

In 2017, 107 of the Casinos Austria and Austrian Lotteries Group’s biggest suppliers were subjected to this analysis and deemed to be satisfactory.

How can sustainable procurement be achieved?

The sustainable procurement approach taken by the Casinos Austria and Austrian Lotteries Group anchors sustainability as far as possible in our value chain. In 2017, we focused on raising awareness regarding sustainability among all our purchasing staff. In 2018, our criteria for sustainable procurement will be developed in cooperation with our central Procurement Department.

But even small initiatives can have a big impact: we already produce all our printed materials in accordance with the Austrian ecolabel guidelines. We also focus on Austrian products for our marketing products: WINWIN, for example, uses chocolate coins from Salzburg, and Casino Wien serves tea from the Lower Austrian company Sonnentor. We also added two electric and six hybrid cars to our vehicle fleet in 2017.