CEO´s Sustainability Review

Bittium acts as a responsible corporate citizen in the surrounding society.

CEO´s Sustainability Review

(Published March 20, 2023)

The past year was the first year of Bittium´s sustainability program for 2022–2025. In accordance with the updated sustainability program, our sustainability work focuses on the three key themes: Bittium employees, customers and information security, and the environment. Ethical principles and sustainable business practices create the foundation for trust, which we maintain by putting our values into action.

Sustainability is part of Bittium´s everyday operations, and it is based on our strategy and values. In our operations, we take into account the environmental impacts and effects on people and good governance. We continuously strive to improve our operations and create through our actions added value that has a positive effect on society that we are part of.

Our customers and other stakeholders must be able to trust us, our product quality and us continuously developing our operations to increase sustainability – ensuring this is vitally important to us. We also want to strengthen sustainable business practices throughout our value chain. We take active measures in order to have our partners and suppliers commit to Bittium´s Code of Conduct through agreements.

In a world where everything is connected and the future seems more uncertain than ever, we need solutions that create security. Bittium is there for its customers. Our mission is to enable secure operations for our customers in both the defense industry and the health care sector. We continuously strengthen our competence in detecting information security threats and participate actively, for example, in information security development projects in the EU.

Competition over the best talents in the industry is fierce. Therefore, we take care of the well-being and competence of our employees, but we also do our share to introduce the technology industry to young people – the future employees. We consider it important to promote diversity, inclusion, equality and equal treatment in our work community. Thus, we have a strong work community where people enjoy spending time together even outside the working hours in various hobby clubs, which we now gladly see resuming their activities after a few quiet years.

Last year, one of the key measures related to environmental sustainability was that we investigated the energy efficiency of our own premises to see where we can actually make improvements to our operations. With regard to our products, we enhanced the way ecodesign principles are taken into account in product design. The most notable environmental impacts of our products occur during the last stage of the life cycle, that is, recycling, where we have very limited possibilities to make a difference. Extending the service life of our products is one practical means and so is the serviceability of the products we manufacture. As individuals, we can all affect our personal carbon footprint and, as a result, the sustainability of society outside our workplaces. Last year, we focused especially on employee communication related to energy efficiency and electricity consumption.

In the past year, we reached several sustainability targets, for example, with regard to the employee commitment index (3.7 on a scale of 1–5) and severe quality defects, which we were able to avoid. We were also able to increase the use of sustainable energy sources through our geothermal heat and solar energy projects.

Sustainable growth requires new technology and skills. Bittium, for its part, strives to ensure the green transition, for example, by innovating more environmentally sustainable solutions and by increasing the energy efficiency of our own operations.

Hannu Huttunen
CEO