Bloomberg Impact: Message From Mike

View the full report at Bloomberg.com.

Better access to data leads to better decisions. Bloomberg was founded on that idea, and we are constantly working to expand the universe of data our customers can tap into.

Today, investors examine companies with greater sophistication than ever before, and one of the new variables they consider is sustainability. They ask, for instance: How sustainable are companies’ internal practices, such as talent recruitment and retention? And how sustainable are companies’ external supply chains, including the natural resources they depend upon? More and more customers seek access to this kind of information–wisely so–but it has not been easy to discover.

Bloomberg is committed to changing that. We now collect sustainability information on more than 11,000 of the most actively traded securities–a ten-fold increase from when we started in 2009. More than 17,000 of our customers use this information in their work. Those numbers will continue to grow as sustainability criteria become an increasingly important variable shaping companies’ market value.

One of the challenges to analyzing sustainability data is its lack of standardization across companies and industries. To address this challenge, I serve as the Chair of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, which develops metrics to include in a company’s annual S.E.C. filings. This reporting will allow analysts to see sustainability data in the same place they see financial data.

At Bloomberg, our commitment to these issues runs through everything we do. Our employees are actively engaged in this work, as part of the 57,000 hours of service that Bloomberg employees around the world performed in 2014. In addition, we have increased the amount of renewable energy powering our offices, built our offices to the highest green building standards, improved energy efficiency more than 40 percent, and become the only news publisher to produce 100 percent of our magazines from sustainable paper sources. These steps have saved us nearly $70 million since 2008, and helped give us an edge in our work to attract and retain the most talented and hardest-working people.

This report provides an overview of our work in these areas and how it is helping us to serve our customers more effectively. We are excited about their potential and committed to being a global leader in this critically important area for many years to come.