Year end: Sep 2017
Assessment date: Feb 2018

Nampak’s reporting is generally transparent and informative, with operational reviews providing detail on underlying value drivers, but mostly of an operational nature. Consequently, reporting was strong around the company’s efforts to innovate in the area of “lightweighting”, particularly for glass and plastics. As with most of its peers, Nampak has over-worked the IR framework, generating a multitude of risk and materiality tables. These contain basic phrases and generalisations that contribute little to an understanding of the specific challenges and opportunities faced by the company, nor reveal how it is responding to these.

A particular vulnerability unaddressed is the company’s exposure to market dominance. Notwithstanding this criticism, certain issues, such as the operational challenges at its glass operation, have emerged and are maturely dealt with by the company’s leadership. On the other hand, promotion of initiatives and anecdotes of good citizenship (for example in the area of supplier development) without regard to scale and context, mislead the reader as to the significance of the company’s response to the underlying issue.

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