In the golden autumn of 2019, the first Sustainable Development Forum held in Beijing's Shihe Park entered the "focus moment" of the day: Pan Gang, chairman of Yili Group, smiled as he walked onto the stage, and together with the heads of 15 Chinese and foreign enterprises, including Alibaba, China Three Gorges Group, Ericsson and Schneider Electric, launched the "Sustainable Business Action Initiative". At that time, Pan, who was standing in the center, had just finished a keynote speech in which he proposed that "as a big enterprise, we should take on a big role and take action to help the sustainable development of human society in order to realize the sustainable development of our enterprise." This view was also incorporated into the "Shihe Park Initiative" released subsequently, which became one of the hottest topics in the global media at that time.

Six months later, when Yili announced its 2019 annual report, a series of eye-catching data became the best footnote for Pan Gang's view: total revenue of 90.223 billion yuan in 2019, up 13.41% year-on-year, net profit of 7 billion yuan, up 7.73% year-on-year, the first in the dairy industry in Asia for six consecutive years, with continuous revenue growth of over 10 billion, demonstrating absolute leading scale advantage and steady growth ability.

Time has changed, but Pan Gang's direction for sustainable development has never changed. The current spreading global epidemic is testing the management wisdom of an organization to see if it can withstand the storm. "No matter what challenges we face, our determination to assume global responsibility has never changed, our pursuit of sustainable development has never changed, and our dream of chasing health has never changed." In the Yili 2019 Sustainability Report, released in conjunction with the 2019 Annual Report, Pan Gang re-emphasized this point. Under his leadership, Yili is working to consolidate the foundation of the sustainable development pattern with globalization; guarantee its own sustainable and sound operation with sustainable management power; and build a global health ecosystem together with partners with sustainable synergy power. "We believe that through our continuous exploration and efforts, we will be able to reach the goal of 'nourishing the vitality of life to achieve universal health coverage', which is also the value and meaning of our existence."

Building global consensus to exercise sustainable leadership

Management guru Peter Drucker once said, "A manager, is someone who does things right. An entrepreneur, is someone who does the right thing." In Pan Gang's view, "sustainable development" is the "right thing". In 2007, Pan Gang put forward the concept of "green leadership" for the first time at the first Summer Davos Forum, advocating that Chinese enterprises should pursue "green production, green consumption and green development". This model represents not only the concept of environmental protection, but also the strategy of sustainable development.

In 2009, Pan Gang upgraded this concept to Yili's "Green Industry Chain Strategy", proving the value of sustainable development to the world with his actions. For more than a decade, from building and promoting organic farms, to using hundreds of millions of dollars of biodegradable packaging materials each year, to continuously implementing a comprehensive carbon audit ......, Yili has insisted on practicing sustainable development with its actions, and has realized the comprehensive extension of this strategy to the whole industry.

On April 4, 2017, Yili held an important discussion on "sustainability". At the meeting, Pan Gang said, "Yili's industrial chain is very long, one end is related to the interests of millions of dairy farmers, the other end is related to the nutritional health of more than one billion consumers, and in the middle, it also drives the common development of the majority of industry chain partners. Therefore, Yili always adheres to the concept of 'thickness is better than speed', and actively creates social value while creating commercial value."

In April 2019, proposed by Pan Gang, leading companies in the global dairy industry chain established the industry's first global network for sustainable supply chains ("WISH Network") in China to jointly develop healthy products, advocate sustainable consumption, promote healthy lifestyles, and deliver care for nutrition and health to the poorest regions. They are committed to and take positive actions to protect the beauty of biodiversity, join hands with all stakeholders to gather the momentum of sustainable development, integrate sustainable development throughout the industry chain, and take advantage of synergy to promote sustainable development of the industry and society.

Pan Gang has always believed that in order to achieve sustainable development, it is necessary to build global consensus, discuss health issues, build a healthy ecology, share health achievements, give full play to sustainable leadership, and make sustainable development the "right thing" for all enterprises.

Stimulating endogenous dynamic to enhance sustainability

Dr. Lu Jianzhong, director of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), said of Yili: "Today, sustainability awareness has become a 'deep consciousness' among all Yili employees. At Yili, sustainability is a real thing, a tangible thing that each person, each post, each raw material, each process and each product is doing each day."

In Pan Gang's view, to be more sustainable, enterprises should be a "long runner", and Yili should be a "leader". In order to be a sustainable leader in the industry, it is necessary to continuously improve on the basis of its own core competitiveness, take quality as the credo, and constantly stimulate the endogenous dynamic.

All along, what Pan Gang values most is quality. He has repeatedly said that in response to the current opportunities and challenges in the global economy, enterprises must first take quality as their credo and build "quality enterprises". Pan Gang summed up the corporate credo of "Yili is quality" in practice and put it on top of the corporate vision. The quality as life is Pan Gang's "orinignal inspiration " and the key to Yili's success.

In March 2016, more than 30 MBA students and faculty from Stanford University Business School visited Yili Group's new industrial park and was surprised, "It's amazing!. And this is only one of many international "amazements" about Yili's quality. There was a time when Yili had a reputation among its foreign counterparts for having "tough standards". This is because Yili has to select all domestic and foreign suppliers for its brands before they can cooperate. Some of the dairy raw materials need to be specially processed by suppliers to meet Yili's standards. Yili not only has many requirements for raw material quality control indicators, but also sets extremely strict limit values for each indicator.

"This is too harsh!" A foreign supplier got this standard and couldn't help but shout out, as in countries such as New Zealand and the United States, there are simply no such strict standards for raw milk. But Yili's global standards are not subject to change, because here, quality is life.

Nowadays, we are in the "VUCA era", which is full of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, putting higher demands on the dynamic response ability and development resilience of enterprises to adapt to the environment. But in the eyes of Pan Gang, no matter how the external environment changes, the pursuit of sustainable development cannot change. The only way to make sustainable development take root in the enterprise is to adhere to the quality credo and motivate the internal strength.

Leading the whole industry chain to promote sustainable synergy

The way of the great Tao is that the world is one community. Pan Gang believes that "big enterprises should have big responsibilities" and strengthen cooperation in the process of sustainable development, so that the partners of the whole industry chain can work together to build consensus, innovate cooperation models, build a better future and contribute to the sustainable development of human society with their actions.

As a leading dairy enterprise, Yili crosses the entire industry chain of the food industry, linking millions of farmers and herdsmen upstream and more than one billion consumers downstream. However, farmers and herdsmen have been facing the problem of high technical threshold of dairy farming and weak farming level and farm management ability in production.

This challenge has made Pan Gang think. For this reason, he asked Yili's technical staff to go deep into the upper reaches of the farming industry, not only to provide on-site guidance and technical services for farmers and herdsmen, but also to set up a "dairy school" and a "training camp for cattle raising" to provide them with training in technology and management. One farmer said that local dairy farmers are particularly excited when they see Yili staff, and rush to listen to a training lecture. In practice, Yili gave up the rigid duck-fill training and invited more famous experts from home and abroad to be mentors to teach farmers and herdsmen how to improve their farming techniques and management skills. In addition, Yili also provides farmers and herdermen with a full range of training programs tailored to their individual characteristics, including technology, management and finance.

Since 2014, Yili has organized more than 800 special training sessions and lectures on farm management, and trained nearly 20,000 farmers and herdsmen, enabling a new generation of farm managers, who appear to the outside world not to "know how to farm at all," to successfully take over the baton of dairy farming.

On the basis of improving its own strength, Yili continues to play a leading role as an industry leader, sharing its resources with a sincere attitude and open-mindedness, and bringing together all parties to achieve sustainable development of the whole industry chain.

In 2020, the global economic and social development is facing deep adjustment. However, Pan Gang said, "Yili will continue to take advantage of its global brand, resources, innovation and channels to become the world's most trusted health food provider, bringing together all the strength from the global industry chain, partners, employees and other parties to build a 'global health ecosystem' with sustainable momentum. We will work with all parties to build a 'global health ecosystem' and realize the dream of achieving universal health coverage." Yili, which is riding the waves of the global health industry, will continue to use "sustainable development" as the rudder and sail to the top of 100 billion under the guidance of the concept of "global health ecosystem", and move towards the goal of "No. 1 in global dairy industry and top five in health food”in future.