Welcome to Pentair’s first global citizenship report. It establishes an important benchmark to measure our collective performance and progress as a global corporate citizen. Embracing Lean principles, our goal is simple — to improve every day. This report captures some of our successes and some of the areas where we believe we can do better.
To assess our current efforts and drive improvement, we created a citizenship council in early 2008. The council is led by Pentair President and Chief Operating Officer Michael Schrock and includes twelve Pentair leaders from across the company. The Council was tasked with examining Pentair’s global citizenship practices and policies, making recommendations for improvements, and creating this publication. Their work was critically important to making this report a reality, and in defining company-wide goals and metrics that we will use to measure our progress against our aspirations.
At Pentair, we believe being a good global citizen makes good business sense. It reflects our commitment to conduct business in an ethical manner and to pursue sustainable business practices that benefit all of our stakeholders —
investors, employees, customers, suppliers and our
communities. We would rather lose business for the right reasons than win for the wrong reasons. We call this form of stewardship “Winning Right.”
Pentair’s 15,000 employees around the world share a common, deeply rooted philosophy of Winning Right. Our employees will tell you that Winning Right embodies our aim to succeed in business by doing the right thing, in all circumstances. Our Winning Right culture also demonstrates how deeply embedded our Code of Business Conduct and Ethics has become since it was created more than 35 years ago.
We encourage employees to take initiative, be accountable and to make a positive difference. Employee empowerment and leadership are strong traditions at Pentair. As you’ll see in this report, many of our greatest successes are the result of empowered individuals who chose to make a difference. We have tremendous opportunities to learn from each other and adopt best practices across Pentair.
We feel passionately about our business and our respon-sibilities to be good corporate stewards. To our investors, we are responsible for sound corporate governance and financial performance. We also are responsible for the safety of our worldwide employees and the safe operation of our facilities.
Environmentally, we see meaningful opportunities to improve our performance in this critical area and to create a positive social impact. Pentair is uniquely positioned to affect global water and energy conservation efforts. Today, more than 70 percent of our revenues are derived from our Water Segment. We offer leading-edge products that conserve natural resources through lower water and energy consumption. We also offer technical product solutions which protect sensitive electronics. Our expansion into new markets with innovative solutions is a win-win for Pentair, our customers, investors and all global citizens with a stake in a healthy environment.
We are also committed to improving people’s lives. We commit 2 percent of our annual pre-tax income to charitable giving through The Pentair Foundation. Since its inception in 1998, The Pentair Foundation has donated more than $24 million to the communities in which we operate.
In addition, through a multi-year, $4.6 million grant to the non-profit Water Missions International (WMI), the Foundation is working to improve access to safe, clean water for the quarter of a million people in Colon, Honduras, through Project SafeWater-Colon. Working with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and WMI, the goal of this project is to establish credible and scientifically defensible data to demonstrate that it’s possible to solve the world’s water crisis cost-effectively. To accomplish this, we’re reinventing how water and sanitation are treated in developing countries. We’re already seeing progress. The Pentair Foundation is making this transformation a reality and proving that the world’s water issues can be solved quickly and affordably.
As these and many other examples in this report show, we are committed to making a difference. We’re approaching that commitment with the same determination with which we pursue all of our business goals.
We hope you will let us know what you think of our efforts, as we work to improve our performance every day.
Sincerely,
Randall J. Hogan
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer