Sustainability is part of Linde’s tradition and is expressly enshrined in the principles of the company. In the dialogue with our stakeholders – our customers, suppliers, shareholders and employees – we assume our corporate responsibility. One of our principal aims in this area is not only to evaluate the profitability of our diverse production processes and products, but also to ascertain precisely their ecological and social impact and to manage it.

To stimulate discussions throughout society, our most recent Corporate Responsibility Report, published in November 2008, focused particularly on the issues of environmental and climate protection, as well as that of securing energy supplies. In this report, we describe in detail gases applications and technologies which, for example, make renewable energies economically viable, reduce the use of resources or contribute towards reducing waste and emissions.

During the financial year, we met the targets we had set ourselves for our CR activities to the greatest possible extent.

Corporate responsibility management

To implement CR with its related programmes and measures as efficiently as possible in the Group, we have identified clearly-defined areas of activity: employees, SHEQ¹, corporate citizenship, ethics & compliance and capital markets. In the latter case, we are referring to the dialogue in which we are engaging with ethical investors (Socially Responsible Investments).

The task of the corporate responsibility department is to work together with the operating departments to set targets in the respective areas of activity and to achieve those targets.

Corporate responsibility at Linde is managed by a high-level committee, the CR Council. The members of the Council are Professor Dr Wolfgang Reitzle, the Chief Executive Officer of Linde AG, and Dr Aldo Belloni, a member of the Executive Board, together with the managers with overall Group responsibility for Corporate Communications & Investor Relations, Human Resources, Internal Audit, Legal and SHEQ.

CR road-map 2008/09

In the 2008 financial year, we were able to reach some important milestones in the focused development of our CR activities (CR road-map). These include:

• inclusion for the first time of independent third parties in the verification of selected key CR figures,
• the development of a Key Performance Indicator (Glossary) (KPI) for environmental innovations in the Engineering Division,
• the introduction of a web-based tool to collect Group-wide environmental data,
• new joint initiatives with universities to encourage the latest generation of engineers.

In 2009, the current financial year, we intend to focus more particularly on consultations with our customers about environmental and climate protection. Other important objectives for us are to improve the quality of our recording processes and to consolidate our non-financial key data.

Socially Responsible Investments (SRI)

Both the rating agency oekom research and the banking firm Sarasin & Cie classified Linde AG in 2008 as a sustainable company, thereby recommending the company as a potential investment to investors who attach importance to ecological and social criteria. Oekom research awarded Linde prime investment status. Based on the criteria of the rating agency, Linde is now one of the chemical companies which operates in a particularly sustainable manner.

Our rating by the Swiss company Sustainable Asset Management (SAM), one of the leading asset managers for sustainable investments, improved slightly in 2008 compared to 2007. SAM rates Linde overall as above average in the area of corporate responsibility.