This blog is a letter written by our Group CEO Igor Leprince for our 2023 Sustainability report.

It has been less than a year since we proudly shared our first sustainability report. A report that reflects our transformational journey and our commitment to deliver advanced connectivity that can shape the smart communities of the future in a sustainable and responsible way.

A lot of good and significant events have happened within our business since then and we thought it would be only appropriate to update this report to reflect some of those changes. For a start, we have now become Boldyn Networks.

Boldyn Networks embodies the combined scale and expertise of our six portfolio companies in the Northern Hemisphere that have set the bar for advanced neutral host technologies in different parts of the world.

All guided by a single purpose: to unlock the power of an interconnected future.

Based on the five-year strategy that we set forth in 2020, we have dramatically expanded our footprint with a strong operation in the US and ongoing growth in Europe and in the UK.

With the move into Boldyn Networks, came some important changes.

We made the decision to work independently from our founding operation in Australia while keeping common shareholders, and we have transitioned our Canadian operation to Rogers Communications. This will allow us to focus on expanding our customer relationships in more verticals and markets than ever before, and to continue attracting bold and dynamic thinkers to our team that make Boldyn Networks a great place to work.

Our name has changed but our commitment has not. As an industry leader, we have an obligation to all our stakeholders and shareholders to ensure we design, build and deploy our products and services in a sustainable way. That is why we have incorporated ESG targets into our business and we continue working towards five Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We believe our ESG actions are a critical part of building a more successful business.

At Boldyn Networks we are building an organisation that is inclusive and equitable for all our colleagues. In the last year, we launched our Global Inclusion, Diversity & Equity Actions (IDEAs) Council with participants from across the globe and developed our IDEAs strategy with measures in place to track our progress. Specifically, we began with a goal to grow female leadership representation from 30% to 45% within my team and their direct reports by 2026. Furthermore, we have launched new global policies that support new parents, enable individuals returning from an approved leave to integrate back into the workforce, provide floating holidays to celebrate religious or cultural observations of their choosing, and paid time off for our colleagues to volunteer in charitable organisations within our communities. Through these initiatives - with more to come in the future - we will continue to invest in building a highly capable diverse workforce around the globe.

For us, opportunities for a more equitable world mean considering our impact on the communities we operate in.

Through providing reslient communicaiton infrastrcuture, we believe we can positively impact communities and move society forward. We are working on closing the digital divide through our continued collaboration with industry partners and focus on public-private partnerships. Our participation in the LinkNYC project, the largest free public Wi-Fi network in the US; our long-term partnership with Transport for London as the 5G backbone of London’s connectivity and emergency services; and our involvement in the Sunderland smart city development are a testament of our vision for a converged ecosystem for connected communities.

To say we have ethical operations and supply chains, we need to continue to improve our health and safety reporting and performance and our control measures in the fight against modern slavery. Our contractors and supply chains are a big part of this.

Reducing our carbon emissions is another critical deliverable. We are currenlty developing our reduction plans to beat our target of net zero scope 1 and 2 emissions by 2040 and planning to assess reducing our scope 3 over the next two years.

I do believe that as the new Boldyn Networks we're not just reimagining the communities of tomorrow we're shaping the future in a way that benefits everyone by making inclusive network access the status quo.

One question we continue to ask each other: Are we being ambitious enough?