Corporate Social Responsibility at HP

In April 2005, HP became one of the four American and Canadian firms to bag the Ceres-ACCA Award.
HP bagged the award for Best Sustainability Reporting. This award was given by the Boston-based
Ceres Coalition2 and the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA).

The Ceres-ACCA awards were constituted in the year 2002 to highlight best practices in reporting
sustainability, social and environmental issues by US and Canadian firms. HP was chosen from among
68 North American organizations. In the award ceremony, Mindy S. Lubber, President of Ceres said,
"With the expanded information-sharing capabilities of the 21st century, investors and consumers
make an increasing number of their decisions based on a company's handling of environmental, social
and other sustainability issues. These reports are one of the key ways companies can communicate
these issues to investors and other stakeholders."4 The US-based HP was a technology solutions
company that catered to individual consumers, small businesses and large organizations in the world.

The company offered information technology (IT) infrastructure such as servers and storage
systems, desktop personal computers (PCs) for home use, desktop PCs for office use, workstations,
notebooks, printers, fax, copiers and scanners, digital cameras, televisions and other entertainment
systems. For the fiscal year ended October 31, 2005, HP revenues totaled US$ 86.2 billion. It employed
151,000 people in more than 170 countries.

Adopted in 1957, the corporate objectives of HP included customer satisfaction, profits,

market leadership, growth, employee commitment, leadership capability and global citizenship.

Ken Larson, Director, Corporate Social responsibility (CSR) at HP said, "HP has always been deeply
committed to global citizenship. In fact, we identified it as a corporate objective, one of only seven,
alongside others such as profit and market leadership, for example, in 1957. At the core of our global
citizenship commitment is a devotion to ethics and community engagement. Global citizenship at HP
encompasses a wide range of issues, but environmental stewardship is a priority.

This has been demonstrated time and again through programs such as our internal product recycling
initiative introduced in 1987, and efforts to reduce energy consumption at our facilities.

HP was started by Stanford engineers William Hewlett and David Packard (Packard) in Palo Alto in the
state of California in 1938 as an electronics instruments company. The first product manufactured by
HP was a resistance capacity audio oscillator, an instrument for testing sound equipment. In the
1940s, HP's products became popular with scientists and engineers.

The company's growth was further boosted by heavy purchases that were made by the US
government during the Second World War. In the 1950s, HP developed strong technological
capabilities in the rapidly evolving electronics business. In 1951, HP invented the high speed frequency
counter, which significantly reduced the time required to measure high frequencies.

HP's CSR initiatives began in the early 1940s, with the donation of US$ 5 to a local charity. The
momentum for these initiatives was set by the company founders. Packard believed that building
long-term shareholder value was not just about an organization making profits, but about the
organization making a contribution to society and its people.