Our commitments

Industrial safety: our number one priority

Health and safety are core values at Vallourec, as well as our top priorities. Thanks to the constant vigilance and mobilization of our employees and subcontractors, much progress has been made in this area. As a result, 2018 was the fourth year in a row without a fatal accident, also boasting a 28% decrease in accidents requiring a work stoppage and a 15% decrease in total accidents. We owe these highly satisfactory results to the mechanisms in force within the group, including constant reminders of the “12 golden rules,” managers’ safety visits to work stations, and 300 groups around the world dedicated to the continuous improvement of safety. These successes and best practices are shared each year during the Safety Days: at each site, employees come together to participate in safety workshops and recognize our progress. Our sole goal is to strive for zero accidents.

Training: encouraging talent to flourish

The most important players in our transformation are our employees. They help strengthen our competitive edge. To keep them motivated and engaged in Vallourec’s development, we do everything we can to help them match their individual aspirations with company needs. With an ambitious training program suitable for a world leader in smart tubular solutions, the company encourages employees to make the most of their talents throughout their careers.

Our vision for nurturing talent is based on three goals:

• Maintaining an appropriate level of engagement
• Guaranteeing the necessary managerial and technical skills through training and availability of the most effective tools
• Helping all of our employees to achieve the best possible work-life balance

Continuing education—a tool for strategic, managerial, and technical excellence—is primarily provided by Vallourec University (lien) This learning center offers customized training to help employees acquire and reinforce their skills. Almost half of the time spent in training is used to improve career skills, while about a third of the time is spent on safety training.

Improving working conditions

Vallourec relies on several initiatives to improve employees’ working conditions and efficiency. In France, an agreement involving employee representatives and managers made working from home possible for employees of all work sites. Furthermore, experiments are being conducted to facilitate quality control and maintenance operations using augmented reality. Finally, robots are being tested as an alternative way of performing repetitive administrative tasks.

Remuneration: ensuring motivation and loyalty

Vallourec has a motivating, equitable approach to remuneration that includes incentive and profit-sharing schemes, which link employees to overall company performance. In 2018, these schemes totaled 16 million euros. Since 2008, the group has offered annual employee shareholding plans throughout the world. As of 31 December 2018, employees held 3.70% of the group’s capital.

Parity and diversity: developing opportunities

Our gender policy focuses on two goals:

• Bringing more women into operations jobs, especially production jobs
• Facilitating the promotion of women to more senior positions

The network [email protected], composed of committed male and female volunteers, is dedicated to discussion and reflection on equality and on women’s place within the group. It proposes different measures to advance and promote gender diversity.

Our customers

As a trusted partner, we offer customerssolutions with high added valuethat help them lower their operating costs, wherever they need support, throughout the entire value chain. We know our markets and customers inside out. We welcome our customers’ feedback, since it helps us better understand their needs and anticipate their expectations.

This strength, amplified by our culture of constant innovationand technological leadership, has enabled us to design a new set of services brought together in Vallourec.smart. This bundle of integrated services, which takes our competitiveness to another level, aims to improve the performance of our existing physical services, enrich our deep knowledge of the field, and offer new services that take full advantage of the digital world. We co-develop these high-value-added solutions with our customers to ensure that they fit their needs perfectly. Our approach is innovative, proactive, comprehensive, and agile—all for an unprecedented experience.

Our shareholders

We cultivate a close, trusting relationship with our shareholders. Regular informational meetings are held as part of this relationship. Theannual general meeting is an unmissable event that Vallourec executives consider to be a special moment for dialogue, listening, and coming together around a shared ambition: value creation. Beyond the AGM, the year is punctuated by events organized by the Shareholders’ Club.

As required by current regulations, we are committed to providing candid, transparent information to all of our shareholders through our various channels for financial communication (activity report, letter to shareholders, Vallourec at a glance brochure, website, news feed).

Our investors and financial analysts

Throughout the year, the Investor Relations department organizes meetings among group executives, institutional investors, and financial analysts in France and abroad for the following occasions:

• Publication of the quarterly financial results via a conference call broadcast live and recorded for later listening on the group’s website
• Publication of the annual financial results (discussion takes place in Paris at a physical meeting)
• Events dedicated to socially responsible investment (SRI) during which group executives meet representatives of investment funds and SRI analysts
• Investor Days organized by Vallourec outside of the periods of time when financial results are announced; at these events, Vallourec presents its strategy, products, and operations to the financial community. Each Investor Day is recorded and rebroadcast on the group website
• Roadshows and conference calls headed by Vallourec or other events that the group participates in at the main international stock exchanges

 

Our suppliers

As a “partner for every possibility” for our customers, we seek to build the same kind of contractual, long-term relationship with our suppliers. Our desire to strive for excellence and innovation goes hand-in-hand with a responsible purchasingpolicy. Our Sourcing department follows consistent policies and balances centralized management with local guidance, using tools and processes shared by all group entities. The goal: optimize management of our suppliers, monitor their performance, and facilitate synergies.

We choose suppliers based on corporate social responsibility criteria. We have very high standards with regard to sustainable development, ethics, and safety, since the stakes for the group are equally high. We regularly perform inspections to identify supplier risks in France and elsewhere in the world, and we implement corrective actions to minimize them.

 

Supporting local communities

We emphasize open, constructive dialogue with populations that live near our installations. This facilitates the development of local support partnerships, sometimes at the initiative of our employees. Economically speaking, we contribute greatly to local industry by purchasing a large amount of our required supplies in the local area. Local sourcing represented 45% of our total purchases in 2018.

Beyond that, we are involved in numerous support programs in each of our four regions that promote education, health and development. In 2018, Vallourec dedicated about 2.45 million euros to such initiatives.

Brazil has some of the best examples of these projects. Located in Belo Horizonte, in a very urban and disadvantaged area, our Barreiro site has spent decades cultivating a close relationship with local stakeholders. In close collaboration with local authorities and with the support of tax incentives, Vallourec has launched economic, cultural, and athletics programs for the populations most in need. As a result, 500 young people benefited from the Comunidade viva academic support program in 2018. Furthermore, the restoration of a historic downtown movie theater provided the city with a large cultural center, the Cine Theatro Brasil Vallourec, which welcomed 240,000 visitors in 2018.

Indonesia features another excellent example. Our subsidiary PT Citra Tubindo Tbk promotes programs that provide educational, medical, social, and athletic support, especially those that focus on children. The “Valérie” project is for disadvantaged children in the Nongsa district. It aims to develop the pedagogical skills of schools that provide vocational training.