If you are familiar with Micron, you know that the company is changing fast. The business has grown rapidly in recent years, and we have been streamlining our operations and transforming our efforts as a global leader in memory and storage solutions.
Our marketplace is also changing rapidly. The fields of health care, education, transportation and others are undergoing a dramatic evolution through the use of information technology ranging from artificial intelligence and big data to the internet of things. Micron has significant and growing opportunities to support this evolution and help people use technology to enrich life.
The same holds true of our sustainability program. Although we are still early in our sustainability journey, we are moving fast.
Over the last few years, I have seen the company make tremendous progress on environmental and social issues that intersect the business, from being reactive — determining whether to act on an issue when prompted by outside stakeholders and events — to being highly responsive based on inputs from customers, employees, shareholders and others. Micron has established internal leadership on key sustainability issues. And we have been working to better understand and address these issues, not within a siloed sustainability function, but embedded in efforts throughout the company.
Now, as illustrated in our new sustainability report, we are becoming more strategic and proactive in our sustainability efforts. We have expanded outreach and engagement with our key stakeholders, especially our employees, customers and suppliers.
For example, our new employee engagement program facilitates organizational change and creates a common culture. We are fully integrating sustainability into our customer performance metrics. We are working with suppliers on issues ranging from conflict minerals to protection of foreign migrant workers. And we’ve begun exploring our climate and water-related risks as well as science-based climate targets. You can read more about these and other efforts in the report.
We still have a lot of work to do. The challenges the world faces are tremendous. The opportunities to transform how the world uses information to enrich life are great. The evolution of Micron’s sustainability efforts is ongoing, and growth comes with challenges. We need to look further into the future and do more to address some of our most significant issues. That’s going to take time, and we will face difficulties along the way.
But tenacity is one of our core values. I’m proud of the progress that Micron has made to date, and we are continuing to work on it. I’m excited by the opportunity and the ability that Micron has to act, to improve and to have an outsized impact.