Sustainability comes after cost-effectiveness in the tech industry

As a key industry, the technology sector has an influence on the future of germany as a business location. Analogously, an increasingly strong sustainability discourse is also taking place here. As part of the technology sustainability survey 2021, deloitte surveyed 173 executives in companies from the hardware and software and services sectors on this topic.

The majority (86 percent) of respondents see sustainability as an essential part of their business, and for 88 percent the ie has become more important in recent years.

According to deloitte, the importance of sustainability and the size of the company can be related to one another. Nearly all respondents from companies with more than 1,000 employees see this factor as an important element of their business activities, it states.

The picture is different for smaller companies, however, where almost a third say they do not give sustainability any particular priority. According to the market researchers, one possible reason for this is that smaller companies more often lack the resources and expertise to drive sustainability ies forward.

Sustainability primarily economically motivated

The researchers also looked at the reasons why the technology industry is addressing the ie of sustainability. The incentives for this are primarily of an economic nature. More than half (57 percent) of the experts surveyed are primarily driven by reducing operating costs in their sustainability initiatives. 47 percent want to tap new markets and 42 percent are responding to customer demand. Only about a third (32 percent) are concerned with motivating their own employees. Mitigating climate risks (21 percent) and intrinsic commitment (6 percent) come last in the motivation ranking.

Between wish and reality

Overall, it companies do act sustainably, but only if they expect to benefit economically. According to deloitte, sustainability initiatives actually pay off in practice: 84 percent of executives already observe positive effects of their activities today. Initiatives in the area of software and services are proving to be more effective than average. According to the technology sustainability survey, the level of agreement on the effectiveness of sustainability activities is almost two-thirds higher than in the hardware sector.