Audited by PwC and Mazars, the first sustainability report of Sanofi was published on 13 February 2025. The French pharmaceutical company with 83,000 employees is one of the first 30 organisations with more than 500 employees and a turnover of €40 million to have published the results of this unprecedented exercise in social and environmental reporting. This report, over 150 pages long, including 30 on social aspects, relating to both the internal and the value chain, represents a “certain continuity with what we did previously, but with a new step to be taken that is much higher than the previous ones”, says Laurent Lhopitallier, the company’s ESG director, in charge of non-financial reporting and relations with rating agencies and investors on these issues.
Double materiality analysis
The main new feature of the CSRD is the double materiality analysis, which highlights the pharmaceutical group’s impact on the environment and society and the financial consequences of these issues for the company. “We carried out an initial double materiality analysis in 2022, when the directive was issued,” says Lhopitallier. “We chose to use stakeholders not to establish whether a subject is material but to qualify the topics, for example to determine what social dialogue means for Sanofi, so as to focus more on the countries in which it is complicated to conduct.
