Agility to address key industry issues at WEF Annual Meeting in Davos
Global logistics Company supports World Economic Forum as Strategic Partner
Tarek Sultan, Chairman and Managing Director of Agility, will lead the Logistics & Transportation Governors Board at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos this week. The Logistics and Transportation Board is a round-table that allows senior executives from the world’s biggest logistics company to define and discuss critical industry issues, to learn from each other’s experience, and to work together on joint projects of interest.
With over a decade of experience leading one of the most rapidly growing logistics companies in the world, Sultan will facilitate an industry wide discussion on key challenges like anti-corruption, enabling trade, risk & resilience and supply chain decarbonisation. “As the world focuses on the economic crisis and looks to solutions, there has never been a more important time for industry leaders to come together,” said Sultan.
Agility also signed a strategic partnership agreement with the WEF this year, joining other companies such as Citi, Coca-cola, Intel and Microsoft, in contributing expertise and resources at the highest level in order to advance worldwide economic and social progress.
Agility is actively involved in a variety of WEF initiatives, relating to humanitarian relief, sustainability and anti-corruption. At the WEF Annual Meeting 2008, Agility announced a partnership with UPS and TNT to create Logistics Emergency Teams (LETs), rapid response teams that are deployed to assist the humanitarian community in managing the relief supply chain. The first LETs were deployed in May 2008 in response to Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar where Agility helped manage humanitarian freight movements that were distributed amongst 1.5 million beneficiaries.
Agility was also one of 100 global companies that signed the CEO Climate Policy Recommendation to G8 Leaders and has made great strides in reducing its own corporate carbon footprint. Over the course of the last year, Agility became the first logistics company to go carbon neutral in New Zealand, reduced energy consumption in its largest global operation by 30% - taking over 9,000 tons of carbon out of the air, and worked with a leading customer to reduce packaging waste, eliminating 5.5 million pounds of plastic from the customer’s supply chain.
Other programs that Agility have worked closely with the WEF on include the Partnering Against Corruption Initiative (PACI); a campaign that commits signatories to having a zero-tolerance policy towards bribery and to formulating and implementing anti-corruption systems. Agility became a signatory of the PACI in November 2008.
“Agility has had a long relationship with the WEF and we are extremely pleased to extend our participation and bring our wealth of logistics experience to the role of strategic partner at this year’s event,” said Sultan. “Taking into account the current global economic conditions, such forums assume even greater importance as there is an urgent need to analyze and debate each pressing issue, not only for our industry, but across all sectors around the world,” he added.
