Within PUMA

OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH & SAFETY

We want our employees to be healthy and safe, so we make sure that health and safety issues in the workplace are taken seriously. Although the COVID-19 pandemic ceased in 2023, we continued to provide free masks, rapid tests and vaccines where needed. To help our employees cope with this politically and economically challenging environment and its increased mental stress, we focused on mental wellbeing, resilience, and mindfulness in 2023.

Our global occupational health and safety policy underlines the importance of this issue. PUMA has a central Health and Safety Committee at our headquarters in Herzogenaurach, which meets every three months. The health and safety experts on this internal committee exchange information on health problems and risks and carry out regular health and safety inspections. These are supplemented by inspections by official bodies such as the German Berufsgenossenschaft. Each of our major sites has local health and safety experts. Our Global Director People and Organisation, as part of our Executive Management Team, reports at least quarterly on health and safety issues to our Executive Committee.

In our Headquarter in Herzogenaurach we got successfully certified for the ISO 45001 standard. ISO 45001 is an international standard that outlines the requirements for an occupational health and safety management system (OHSMS) and provides a framework to proactively manage and improve the occupational health and safety performance. This certification not only demonstrates our commitment to safety and compliance with health and safety law but also helps us to identify and address safety risks.

We have set ourselves the bonus-related goals of zero fatalities and lowering the average injury rate year on year. For 2023, we set a goal to stay below a lost time injury rate of 0.50. The lost time injury rate expresses the number of lost time injuries per 200.000 worked hours. In addition to conducting safety training courses at all our sites, we also offer online training programs to prepare employees for potential emergency situations and thus reduce the number of accidents. In 2023, we promoted our digital OHS training course to all our sites, which included hygiene and proper mobile office behavior. Last year, we provided a total of 27,764 hours of safety training, while 10,769 employees were trained in fire safety and 7,692 employees in first aid. In 2023, 98 workplace accidents requiring a work stoppage were recorded worldwide. This corresponds to a lost time injury rate of 0.46 compared to 0.45 in 2022. The lost time injury rate for PUMA SE was zero and zero in the previous year. Another indicator of employee engagement and the health of our workforce is the rate of absence due to sickness, which was 1.95% in 2023. We recorded no fatal accidents, and the rate of occupational diseases was zero at PUMA in the last 12 years, including 2023.

SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT

Community Engagement

2023 was another good year for PUMA's community engagement. With the support of our employees, we engaged with local communities around the world through various projects. These ranged from beach clean-ups and tree planting to organising and participating in charity runs. Colleagues also helped underprivileged people, especially children, by donating food and school supplies and started many other wonderful initiatives.

Here are two examples of how they have helped:

PUMA Ukraine supports children affected by the war. Many of these children have lost everything -– their childhoods, their homes, and their friends. In collaboration with the Peace in Amour Shelter in Dnipro, PUMA Ukraine employees sought to bring joy and warmth to these youngsters. Corporate staff, store managers and warehouse staff personalised gifts for the children by printing their names on T-shirts, backpacks, and hoodies.

The PUMA team in South Africa organised several projects. As part of a beach clean-up, they picked up litter from the beach and riverbanks. They also went to animal shelters and walked and played with the animals, bringing food and blankets for the pets. The biggest CSR events take place every year at the head office and in the stores: In 2023, the group prepared 2000 staple food parcels and 850 amenity kits for food banks, children's homes and elderly people who can not move around. South African retail workers across the country packed individual sandwiches to send to organisations in their local areas.

We have set ourselves the ambitious goal of spending at least twice as many hours on social engagement as our average full-time equivalents (FTE) this year. We encouraged all of our employees around the world to participate and recorded projects and employee engagement on an online platform. In total, initiatives led by our subsidiaries on five continents contributed a total of 57,344 hours (3,113 for PUMA SE) of community engagement. With the projects, we helped protect the environment, promote health and fitness, fight discrimination or support education for children in need. Often these projects were carried out in cooperation with local non-profit organisations. Considering that the number of full-time employees (FTEs) in 2023 was 18,681 (1,255 for PUMA SE), we significantly exceeded our target. Since the start of our community engagement program in 2016, we have recorded now over 200,000 community engagement hours globally.

CHARITY CAT

Charity Cat organisation founded by employees continues to support projects near and far in 2023.

The members of Charity Cat have a huge heart for people in need – whether that is right next door or across the globe. The charitable organisation was founded by PUMA employees in 2004 and has been fundraising, supporting special causes, and partnering with different other charities ever since. There is Sozialtreff Erlangen, for example, in the next town over from PUMA’s headquarters in Germany. Charity Cat not only supports Sozialtreff Erlangen with the food donations, but members of the charity actually help out within that organisation.

Further afield, on the Philippine island Samar to be precise, Charity Cat has been supporting the activities of the charity Herz zu Herz e.V. (which means “Heart to Heart” in English). The goal is to help the poorest families and children there to build a roof over their heads, make sure they have enough to eat and send them to school. This year’s success story from Samar was that several children were able to finish high school, while two young people went through culinary school, with one of them landing a job in a five-star hotel at the end!

Another long-time partnered organisation of Charity Cat is FONMEH e.V. in Haiti, that has built an orphanage for a group of children and young people, keeping them off the streets and in education. In Haiti, the situation has gotten a lot worse: due to droughts and inflation, around 40% of the country’s population is suffering extreme hunger or does not have enough to eat. So, Charity Cat was glad to help at least the kids in FONMEH’s orphanage – who have been sharing their food with friends as neighbours – as well as other local people in Haiti with a special financial donation in 2023, on top of the usual clothes and financial support.

Other Charity Cat activities included payments for food donations to be driven to the Ukraine, where the war that started over one year ago is still ongoing and affecting many people, as well as emergency financial donations for the victims of the huge earthquake in the already hard-hit area of south eastern Turkey in spring and the catastrophic flooding that struck eastern Libya in the summer via Aktion Deutschland Hilft e.V.

Besides financial support, Charity Cat also gives away PUMA clothing and shoes to partnered projects. For example „Wir packen’s an e.V.“received several donations of clothing, underwear and especially shoes, that was distributed to refugees fleeing their countries via Greece, France or Bosnia.

Charity Cat raises money through generous monetary donations from individuals, by fundraising during employee events and by organising internal sample give-aways of products provided by PUMA, during which employees can donate money for different Charity Cat projects.