December the 2nd 2020 – Signify Croatia is an innovative Croatian company with a primary focus placed on sustainable business, encompassing everything from combating climate change to food availability, the circular economy and human safety, security and health.
In an interview with Poslovni Dnevnik, Signify Croatia talks about sustainable business, the company’s goals and how it succeeds in managing to actually achieve them. Martina Simic Baranovic of Signify Croatia also commented on how their services and products enable savings and singled out solutions from their portfolio that are most effective in combating climate change. She also revealed how much interest there is in this type of service globally, and how much of that interest lies here in Croatia and within the country’s more immediate region.
Exactly how many sustainable areas do you cover in your business with the services you offer? What are these specific areas?
Signify Croatia is a global leader in lighting, and lighting has a lot of green potential, so we’re striving to be a leader in sustainability. For good results, it’s important to choose focus, and we’ve placed our in five areas where we can contribute the most. These are food availability, climate protection, the circular economy, health and well-being, and human safety and security.
How did you choose these areas to incorporate into your business and what results have you achieved so far in this field?
We’re guided by the United Nation’s goals of sustainable development, and we’ve considered how we can respond to them through our own business and through our products. The results so far are excellent, we’ve already become carbon neutral this year, which is an incredible success for a company that has factories around the world and uses huge logistics capacites, and we have a new goal to double our positive performance by the year 2025.
In line with these areas, you also offer groups of products and services that respond to specific issues. How many such products and services does Signify Croatia offer on the market?
Through our products, we can help other companies to become sustainable, and this is of course a much greater contribution to the European green plan, and to the whole country. Dealing with top quality LED lighting with each product, we contribute to energy efficiency.
I must emphasise here that not all types of LED lighting are actually sustainable, there is an invaluable quality to achieve great savings and ensure a long service life. With poor quality, which we often see, users have the problem of rapid decay, the inability to repair, the generation of electronic waste, problems affecting the health and safety of people, all of which are contrary to the goals of sustainable development. As of this year, we have introduced a sustainability declaration for over 20 of our product groups. It’s a document that transparently states the detailed impact on nature for a particular product. I believe this is the future we all want.
Can you list some of these products and how exactly and how much they help and ensure savings, while also taking into account the well-being of our planet?
LED lighting alone can bring big savings of up to 70 percent, but you should definitely review the specific case.
In addition to lighting, the most sought after products are controls and sensors for smart management, which can save an additional 20-25 percent on energy, and are applicable in industry, buildings, outdoor lighting, in fact all sectors that will be included in the green plan. Recently, UV-C lamps for the disinfection of air and surfaces are increasingly in demand, which are mostly used in service industries such as shops, sports and health facilities, wherever a large number of people are around.
Which of your products and services respond in the best way to climate change? Which of them would you single out as the most effective in that fight in your view?
In addition to the ones I mentioned, I can also add a new trend of solar lighting that uses solar energy, and we have a good potential for application, given that we’re one of the sunniest European countries. We also have very interesting 3D printed products that, in addition to a very efficient production process, also use recycled materials, and can be adapted to the requirements of each user. I’d also note that sustainability isn’t just about fighting climate change, it should certainly include caring for people, for their safety, health, and doing decent work.
In offices, it’s extremely important to provide people with enough top-quality light, which has been proven to improve the overall state of health of employees. When it comes to street lighting, we must think about the safety of citizens’ movement, well-lit roads and pedestrian zones reduce accidents, theft, attacks and enable citizens to walk around safely. At the same time, smart lighting ensures that light is only where it is needed and when it is needed, so there’s no waste of electricity and light pollution that would endanger life in the sky.
How much interest is there in this type of services at the level of your global business, and how much of that interest lies here in Croatia and in the region? What key differences do you notice in our market and in that of the regional one?
Signify Croatia is global leader in lighting, we invest about five percent of our revenue into research and development every year, last year it was exactly 4.5 percent or 279 million euros. Such an exceptional investment allows Signify Croatia to always be the first when it comes to innovation, quality, efficiency and certainly in sustainability, so we always have our customers and their number is constantly growing. Here in Croatia and the region, we’re also successful and very satisfied with our development, but the market is a little different here from the European one, and so are the products we sell. There are many more competitors who sell lower quality products because price is often the most important factor when it comes to making purchases.
Our task is, in as much as is possible, to educate the market. It’s extremely important to understand that the lowest price certainly calls into question the quality of the product, its lifespan, efficiency, the necessary certificates to be met, human health and safety, the waste it generates… We hope that our laws and regulations, as well as public procurement, will include quality labels promoted in Europe, such as the Declaration of Sustainability, CO2 emissions, the share of recycled materials or the company’s assessment of sustainability in the annual financial report.
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