VK Company: VK publishes ESG report for 2021

August 15, 2022

VK publishes ESG report for 2021

VK Company Limited (LSE, MOEX: VKCO, hereinafter referred as VK or the Company) is publishing its annual ESG report for 2021. The Company has launched its own ESG portal (in Russian) covering the key events and news related to the environmental, social and governance aspects of its sustainable development of the past year.

"VK's strategic goal is to make people's lives more comfortable, convenient and secure thanks to our digital services. We pay special attention to cybersecurity, personal data protection and the overall quality of our services. We are also proactively developing online education in order to provide the greatest range of opportunities for our users, said Vladimir Kirienko, CEO of VK (Russia). A major focus of VK's development is to help society, business, and the government in their digital transformation. While developing technologies and launching new products, we strive to minimize our ecological footprint. We believe that the principles of sustainable development which are systematically integrated into our strategy have a positive impact on the key aspects of our business: creation and development of unique digital services, expansion of our audience, improvement of user experience for people with different needs and capabilities, the well-being of our employees, as well as business and society as a whole.

Annual ESG report highlights:

Environmental aspects:

• More than 3,000 of VK employees started using our Electronic Document Management System (28% of total staff)[1]
• The number of donations for ecology-related projects on Dobro Mail.ru increased by 61% year-on-year
• The average annual PUE[2] of a M-100 data center using a liquid cooling system was registered at 1.04

Social aspects:

• Charitable donations by VK staff and VK users totaled RUB 188 million, up 30% year-on-year
• The coverage of VKs Day Against Cyberbullying event reached 130 million views
• The share of women among top managers and team leaders reached 28%, while the share of women among all hired employees stood at 35% in 2021

Corporate governance:

• The average response time of the VKontakte moderation team came in at 1.3 minutes
• In 2021 the Company received no substantiated reports of ethical norms violations

• The share of women on the Board of Directors of VK reached 30%[3].

In 2021, VK conducted surveys to determine the company's sustainability goals and priorities. Surveys were conducted among users, employees, shareholders, business partners and NGO communities. According to the results of the surveys, material topics were identified as follows: personal data protection, cybersecurity, online education, social initiatives, innovations and digitalization, and product quality responsibility.

In each area of sustainable development, the company implements initiatives and projects designed to make the lives of users and employees safer and more convenient.

In the domain of cybersecurity and personal data protection, in Q4 2021 VK launched the VK Protect initiative which combines all the technical solutions that provide protection within the VK ecosystem. We also launched the Security Management Center to boost the security of VK ID user accounts.

VK implements initiatives in education, offering a range of free VK Education projects for audiences of all ages, from preschoolers to professionals. In 2021 our career guidance campaign IT Knowledge Day focusing on video game development brought together more than 290,000 children from 5,700 schools, with more than 3 million viewers watching online. More than 3,500 students from 13 of Russias leading universities took part in VKs educational programs and workshops.

VK supports multiple social initiatives. More than 1.5 million users visited the Dobro Mail.rus website in 2021, donating more than RUB 110 million to partner funds and bringing the number of recurring charitable donations to 19,000 for the year. VK continued developing its own charitable fund Kod Dobra, which raised RUB 96 million for NGOs in 2021. VK supported more than 120 social NGOs in 2021, offering grants for advertising campaigns and assistance in their implementation. For the third year in a row, VK held its Day Against Cyberbullying in 2021, garnering support of more than 70 brands and doubling the campaigns coverage year-on-year to 130 million views.

Environmental initiatives are also very important for VK. In 2020 we devoted a separate segment to ecology projects on the Dobro Mail.ru website, and in 2021 managed to raise RUB 3.2 million for ecology, which is 61% more than in 2020. In the summer of 2021, Dobro Mail.ru teamed up with the WWF to raise more than RUB 500,000 for fighting wildfires in Yakutia and RUB 200,000 for a Greenpeace project to start a new forest nursery in the Kaluga region. Thanks to the support of Dobro Mail.ru (RUB 300,000) the Delpha Foundation managed to staff dolphin assistance teams. BIT.GAMES studio supported its local eco community ECOVES and helped clean up the territory around the Sursk reservoir in the Penza region.

About the ESG report:

The report is published in Russian and English. Qualitative and quantitative data in the report adheres to The International Reporting Standards (GRI) and Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB). The Task Force on the Disclosure of Financial Information Related to Climate Change (TCFD) was used as a framework for ESG Risks disclosure.

For further information please contact:

Investors

Tatiana Volochkovich
Phone: +7 495 725 6357 ext.: 3434
Email: t.volochkovich@vk.team

ESG

Kseniia Toporkova
Mobile: +7 926 838 70 89
Email: k.toporkova@vk.team

Press

Sergey Makarov
Mobile: +7 926 818 95 89
Email: se.makarov@vk.team

 About VK

VK is one of Russias largest tech giants. VKs products and services help millions of people with their daily needs online. More than 90% of Russian internet users rely on VK for communication, video games, learning new skills, listening to music, watching and making videos, selling and buying wares, ordering food, and much more. The Company also develops a range of products and services for the digitalization of business processes from online promotion to predictive analytics, corporate social networks, cloud services and business automation. 

[1] As of the end of Q2 2022

[2] PUE is a coefficient that describes how efficiently a data center uses energy; in particular, how much energy is used by computing equipment

[3] By the end of Q2 2022