ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance), first proposed by the UNEP Finance Initiative in the early 2000s, is a framework used to assess an organization's business practices and performance on various sustainability and ethical issues. In recent years, Chinese enterprises have gradually attached more importance to ESG, and increasingly enterprises incorporate it into their strategic planning and daily management.

SANY is the pioneer in Chinese enterprises’ ESG journey. In the last few decades, SANY has been committed to reaching China’s carbon peaking and carbon neutralization goals while consistently improving the organizational system to ensure compliance and stability of the company's operations. Beyond that, SANY has been actively engaged in poverty alleviation, contributing to the UN sustainable development goals of ending poverty in all its manifestations by 2030. Shibadong water is one of SANY’s poverty eradication actions.

Shibadong Village, located in the Xiangxi Tujia and Miao autonomous prefecture in Hunan province, is a traditional Hmong Village tucked away between the Wulin mountainous area. With impassable roads and poor infrastructure, the village was a destitute area in China ten years ago where 57% of its residents were under the poverty line.

In 2013, the Chinese government launched the targeted poverty reduction policy, aiming to help those struggling to make ends meet. Responding to the call of the government, enterprises were actively involved in the action. They took advantage of the village's inherent superiority to develop industries, such as tourism, farming, Miao Embroidery, and its mountain spring water. And SANY is one of them.

Surrounded by mountains, Shibadong village has streams flowing from nature caves, pure, sweet, and pollution-free. The quality is even up to the standard of mineral water. In 2017, SANY visited the Shibadong Village with the Provincial Party Committee to discuss the industry development strategy and the sweet Shibadong spring water attracted SANY. SANY became the first company to work with the Shibadong water.

So far, SANY has been working with the village for about five years, purchasing over 2,000,000 bottles of water and paying out more than 700,000 USD, 15% of which is shared as dividends to each villager of Shibadong, while driving the employment of the surrounding villages and offering over 130 jobs. At the same time, to support local tourism, SANY encourages its employees to travel to the village. With the help of enterprises like SANY, the Shibadong Village has now developed its industries, and people become increasingly happy as their life quality improved a lot.

Different from the outflow of young people ten years ago, with increasing opportunities contributed by enterprises like SANY, a large number of young people return to their hometowns and are devoted to the new field of rural revitalization.

Zhou Juan, a Villager of Shibadong and an employee of the water factory:

SANY Group has been our major customer since we built the water factory in 2017, playing a great role in the revitalization and poverty relief of our village.

Long Shuyou, Deputy head of Shibadong:

I have been the village cadre for 8 years and witnessed the dramatic change in the village. With the support of enterprises like SANY, the narrow roads were turned into wide tarred streets, and our power grid and internet were improved. People’s lives here become better. With lots of job opportunities, people’s sense of gain is also heightened.

The Shibadong Water is only one example of SANY’s public benefit. As a company prioritizing social responsibility over corporate interests, SANY has been devoted to social welfare in the past decades, up to now, SANY has invested hundreds of millions of yuan in Lianyuan to support its elderly care, education, and infrastructure construction, and has participated in the poverty alleviation action of Nujiang Prefecture in Yunnan Province by buying and selling agriculture products…Rolling in the tide of social development, SANY is still writing its rural revitalization story and marching on its ESG journey.