CREATING COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE, BALANCING GROWTH WITH SUSTAINABILITY During the year, we stepped up our sustainability agenda, recognising the arbiter of environmental and social responsibility in our long-term success. We are on a journey to embed sustainable practices across our operations, reducing our carbon footprint while promoting diversity and inclusion, fostering a corporate social responsibility culture, and extending to inculcate sustainability values into our supply chain. Over the past year, we have worked closely with our suppliers, vendors, and partners to ensure they share our commitment on ESG principles and goals. Our ambition and actions were rewarded when Press Metal was included in the FTSE4Good Bursa Malaysia Index in June 2022. We secured a 4-star ESG rating, placing us among the top 25% of publicly listed companies in the FTSE Bursa Malaysia EMAS Index. The Sustainability Report from pages 78 to 194 comprehensively details our report card for 2022, where we are today on our journey towards our goals, our sustainability performance, key highlights and achievements for the year under review. ENHANCING RISK MANAGEMENT AND GOVERNANCE Our growth trajectory for the year under review has been notable as we continued to expand our operations and capacity. As we scale, we have continued to evolve and improve our risk management practices to match the new challenges of business continuity. Press Metal has made significant progress in this regard, enhancing processes and SOPs to monitor and manage our risks more holistically. We invested in our people, providing comprehensive training across the organisation, including our Board, to ensure everyone is in line with the enhanced risk management protocols and governance. As an extension of this, the Risk Management Committee has stepped up with the integration of our ESG risk and governance, working closely with the Sustainability Committee under the Group CEO to align our ESG and climate actions, ensuring a focused, disciplined approach and the clarity of actions and accountability. To this end, a strategic transformation mindset on embedding a “culture of integrated thinking” was inducted throughout our organisation, encouraging everyone to think critically about the impact of their actions and make choices that align with our values and principles. We are committed to enhancing our standards of business integrity and ethics, balancing growth and risk to drive our long-term value creation. THE YEAR AHEAD The fear of an earlier predicted deep recession in Europe has eased, and China’s re-opening has boosted optimism on a global recovery. The resurgence of activities from China could underpin a stronger aluminium price performance. Structural changes brought about by the consequences of the Russia-Ukraine tension with the closure of some smelters in Europe have opened up opportunities for us to fill the demand gap in the market. With our low carbon content production, we are poised to benefit from the increasing diversion to green industries of electric vehicles, renewable energy, packaging and consumer products. We have also made a significant development in our partnership with Glencore, one of the largest globally diversified natural resources companies. Sharing identical philosophies in supporting a low carbon economy and climate commitment, we leverage on this strategic partnership as a further platform to open up new markets in United States of America (“US”) and Europe. As I pen this statement, we are caught by the US and Europe banking turmoil, with implications on fundraising and liquidity in the global banking system. As we navigate through these uncertainties and macro risks ahead, we will also actively take advantage of growth opportunities. We will remain vigilant, agile and resilient. CHAIRMAN’S STATEMENT Cont’d ANNUAL REPORT 2022 10
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