Fair and Impartial Procurement Activities

As Sharp’s business philosophy states, “Our future prosperity is directly linked to the prosperity of our customers, dealers and shareholders,” Sharp aims for sustainable growth and mutual prosperity with all of its suppliers.

To these ends, Sharp emphasizes maintaining impartiality and fairness in all purchasing activities and chooses who it will procure local parts, materials, and equipment from by providing Japanese and overseas suppliers with an equal opportunity to do business with Sharp. This opportunity includes a fair evaluation of whether a supplier meets Sharp’s requirements for quality, standards, and performance.

To ensure sustainable growth and mutual prosperity with its suppliers, Sharp is going beyond initiatives related to the quality, price, and delivery of parts and materials. Sharp is also seeking to fulfill its social responsibilities over a wide range of areas across the entire supply chain. These areas include product safety, environmental protection, human rights and labor, and health and safety.

Sharp’s basic concept, concrete policies, and requests to suppliers pertaining to procurement activities are set out in the Basic Purchasing Principles. And in the Sharp Supply-Chain CSR Deployment Guidebook, which is based on the Basic Purchasing Principles, Sharp clearly declares the implementation of CSR initiatives—such as complying with all laws, regulations, and social standards, and protecting the environment—as one of its procurement policies. Specifically, these include elimination of child/forced labor and discrimination, as well as compliance with labor related laws, such as those dealing with employees’ right to organize and their right to collective bargaining. Sharp also asks its business partners to actively promote such activities.

To deepen the understanding between Sharp and its business partners, Sharp communicates actively with supplier sales representatives on a daily basis.

To help its suppliers gain an understanding of Sharp’s CSR philosophy and to promote CSR-related measures among suppliers, in fiscal 2007, Sharp formulated and distributed its own Sharp Supply-Chain CSR Deployment Guidebook. The Basic Parts Purchase Agreement also includes articles on CSR initiatives, based on the guidebook, that suppliers are requested to follow.

In fiscal 2015, Sharp fully revised the content of its guidebook to conform to the RBA*1 Code of Conduct. Since then, it has revised the guidebook as needed in line with revisions to the RBA Code of Conduct. In this way, Sharp strives to comply with the increasingly sophisticated international standards for CSR.

In fiscal 2019, Japan-based business units carried out the CSR/green procurement survey at approximately 1,400 supplier plants using a survey format conforming to the RBA self-assessment questionnaire.

Following the survey, Sharp gave suppliers their survey scorecards and asked those with low scores to submit improvement plans. Through such communication with suppliers, Sharp strives to step up CSR efforts throughout the entire supply chain.

In China and ASEAN countries, regarding two types of supplier management systems Sharp began implementing starting in fiscal 2017, in 2019 rollout and expansion of these systems was carried out at seven production/procurement bases*2, and a cumulative total of over 2,500 factories in Japan and other countries have been asked to conduct surveys.

In fiscal 2020, Sharp will continue to carry out the CSR/green procurement survey in Japan and plans to expand the supplier management system overseas as well to new factories and other bases that do not yet have it.

Going forward, Sharp will continue to further promote CSR initiatives throughout the entire global supply chain.

• *1 RBA: Responsible Business Alliance. Founded in 2004 by a group of leading electronics companies including Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Dell, the RBA, formerly the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition (EICC), has a code of conduct covering the social, environmental, and ethical responsibilities in the global supply chain of its members in the electronics and a wide range of other industries.
• *2 The seven sites and affiliates are: (1) SSEC (China), (2) Lianyungang Kantatsu Fine Technology Co., Ltd. (China), (3) Kanto Tatsumi Electronics (Pinghu) Co., Ltd. (China), (4) Saigon Stec Co., Ltd. (Vietnam), (5) SHK (Hong Kong), (6) SEM (Malaysia), and (7) SEM Korea (South Korea).