Welcome to Budweiser Brewing Company APAC Limited ESG Webcast. Hosting the webcast today from Budweiser APAC are Mr. Jan Craps, Executive Director, Co-Chair of the Board, and Chief Executive Officer; Mr. Craig Katerberg, Chief Legal and Corporate Affairs Officer; Ms. Linda Qian, Chief People Officer; Mr. Jan Clysner, VP, Procurement and Sustainability; Mr. Terry Yao, Procurement Director, Sustainability and Smart Value; and Ms. Emily Rose , ESG Manager. Materials of this webcast can be found on Budweiser's APAC website at www.budweiserapac.com under the Investor tab on the Results and Presentation page. Throughout the webcast, you may submit your questions in the Q&A box in the webcast screen at any time. Before proceeding, we would like to remind you that some of the information provided during this webcast, including our answers to your questions, may contain statements of future expectations and other forward-looking statements.
These expectations are based on management's current views and assumptions and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors beyond our control. Please refer to this slide of the presentations for the full disclaimer. It's now my pleasure to turn the conference over to Mr. Jan Craps. Sir, you may begin.
Thank you, Desmond. Good morning. Good afternoon, everyone. Apologize for the technical issues. Thank you for joining our ESG webcast, which also happens to coincide with Earth Day. I hope you're all safe and well. We are delighted to share with you how ESG has been embedded in our daily operations, our commitments towards these topics, and our progress thus far. I'll first give a brief overview of our company and then turn it over to Emily to talk about what we've done in the environmental side, followed by Linda to talk about community engagement and Dream-People-Culture, and lastly, to Craig to talk about our corporate governance. We will then be joined with Jan, VP of Procurement and Sustainability, and Terry, Procurement Director, Sustainability, for some Q&A afterwards. Let's begin with a brief introduction to Budweiser APAC.
We are a Pan-Asian brewer operating in over 35 countries and territories with over 50 brands. Our regional footprint is comprised of 52 breweries and 53 distribution centers across our key markets such as China, South Korea, India, and Vietnam. As of the end of 2020, we had approximately 26,000 colleagues representing over 20 nationalities. About 29% of our colleagues are females assuming important roles across our different functions and markets. As many of you are aware, on September 30, 2019, we were listed on the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong with a stock code 1876, the year in which Budweiser was first brewed. As a regional champion, we aim to build even stronger relationships with our local stakeholders, have a more localized and agile decision-making process, champion consolidation in the Asia-Pacific beer industry, and attract exceptional talent in the region by leveraging our Pan-Asian platform.
We are the most profitable brewer across Asia Pacific, with growth potential and opportunities for further margin expansion. In 2020, a year of turbulence and uncertainties, I am extremely proud of our colleagues who have been embracing challenges with resilience and agility. Our commercial performance has been impacted by COVID-19- related restrictions on the sales channel. In 2020, we generated $5.6 billion of revenue, $1.6 billion EBITDA. We also maintained a strong balance sheet with additional efficiencies identified in our working capital and capital expenditures. Our net cash position increased by $387 million as compared to the end of 2019, to approximately $1.3 billion at the end of 2020. As such, our recommended dividend per share increased from $0.0263 in 2019 to $0.0283 in 2020. Our purpose at Budweiser APAC is to bring people together for a better world. We do so safely and responsibly.
We are committed to brewing the best beers in the best way for the environment and our communities. Because in the brewery business, we all know that a healthy environment and thriving communities are key ingredients to a sustainable business. Our purpose is supported by our 10 principles based on Dream-People-Culture, each built on ownership, informality, candor, transparency, meritocracy. Let me go through some of our principles. We start with the first most important principle, dreaming big. Our dream is to build a profitable, growing company. As Asia's leading and most profitable beer company, we are passionate about growth. Our greatest strength is our people, which is our second principle. Our people are curious, bold, and resilient. We actively recruit, develop, and retain people who can be better than ourselves, which is our third principle.
We want all colleagues to feel respected and empowered to bring their authentic selves to work every day. This leads me to our fourth principle. We are a company of owners. We are united by our strong culture, which is a key element of our success. Number five, owners take results personally and lead by example. Number seven, we constantly strive to deliver greater value to our stakeholders, such as our consumers, customers, and business partners, while maintaining sustainable top-line growth in a healthy way. Our final principle, number 10, we never take shortcuts, as we believe this is what true authentic owners should do. We are deeply connected to our communities across the region and want to be a part of the solution where it matters, where we all thrive. Our reputation is the outcome of doing the right things consistently.
That is how we build a company to last for the next 100+ years. We support the United Nations SDGs and the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and strive to contribute directly to their goals through our 2025 sustainability goals, smart drinking goals, road safety initiatives, our volunteering programs, and our disaster relief efforts. We ensure wherever possible to use our scale and partnership to make a positive impact. This diagram shows how our value chain aligns with the UN SDG while building thriving communities. Even before being publicly listed, we have been embedding ESG- related topics into our daily operations. As part of the AB InBev network, we share the same 2025 sustainability goals in smart agriculture, water stewardship, circular packaging, and climate action.
I'll pass this over to Emily, who will take you through our journey of these goals and initiatives, followed by Linda to talk about the social pillar, and Craig for government. Emily, please share with us what amazing things Budweiser APAC has done on the environmental side.
Thank you, Jan. Good morning, good afternoon, everyone. I'm Emily, leading ESG for Budweiser APAC. Today, I'd like to showcase our strategy, key goals, and progress on sustainability on the environmental side. Here at Budweiser APAC, we believe sustainability isn't just part of our business. It is our business. We are working together with our teams across our company to embed sustainability in everything we do to ensure we thrive to make the world a better place. Here are four key sustainability drivers that we focus on. Supply security, which is sourcing the highest quality ingredients, being efficient, resourceful, and effective with our resources. Next is our people who are seeking that sense of purpose, pride to work with us. It's not only vital that we want to attract the best talent, but also to keep them engaged.
Our greatest strength is our people, and we will support every individual to excel. Consumers' awareness of our environmental and social impact has been increasing and have been asking questions. This is an opportunity for us to keep stepping up, innovate, and drive meaningful value. This leads to my next point, innovation, an important driver in building a sustainable future for us and our stakeholders. Therefore, we will continue to stay curious and find solutions to problems. As mentioned before, sustainability has been embedded into our daily operations from first sourcing the highest quality ingredients, brewing the best beer in the best way, which leads to driving efficiency and value creation. Of course, none of these would be possible in sustainability without innovation. Therefore, we continue to embrace new technologies. Finally, we must ensure that our stakeholders hear our story on how we deliver value to them.
We will ensure that we keep pushing boundaries so we continue to do more, as we're never really satisfied. Do we have a sustainability goal? Yes, we do. We have our 2025 sustainability goal, and it's the most ambitious yet. Not only does it address what part we can play, but also how we can ensure our environment and communities where we serve, flourish, and stay resilient. Agricultural product is important to beer. Brewers and farmers have a highly common relationship with a global footprint. We depend heavily on farms, because without a consistent supply of high-quality grains and hops, we cannot ensure the production of quality beer. The primary ingredients of beer include water—and that is why we always say, no water, no beer—yeast, hops, and fermentable grains such as barley and rice.
We have chosen these four goals, smart agriculture, water stewardship, circular packaging, and climate action, as we strongly believe that these are the areas that are close to our core business and where we can bring the most change and create value. What are some of our key achievements we achieved in 2020 under each of the 2025 sustainability goals core pillar? Under smart agriculture, 92% of our farmers in India met our criteria for skilled, meaning farmers have access to good barley varieties and technical training. 100% of our farmers are connected, meaning with whom who are regularly in touch with to share best practices from how to grow their crops, the latest market price, or even how to ensure the health and safety on their farms. 83% of our farmers are financially empowered.
It means we help them to grow their businesses for the long term and ensure that they have access to financial tools they need, ensuring they can improve their resiliency and long-term sustainability. Water is a key ingredient in all our products. It is also a critical resource for our communities. It is our role as a world leading brewer to work towards ensuring our communities have improved water quality and availability. We have set ambitious water efficiency targets across our businesses with even more ambitious goals from our breweries located in communities facing high water stress. We have been implementing new technologies and process improvements across our footprint to reduce water usage in our breweries. We were able to reduce water intensity to 2.47 water used by hectoliter of beer produced in 2020. That's a 17% reduction compared to our 2017 baseline.
In India, five high-risk sites have been identified, and we strive to improve water availability and quality for our communities around these breweries. A collaborative approach was taken by working with a local partner, government, NGO, and our community to create an integrated and sustainable solution. We replenished more than 10 million hectoliter of groundwater in these identified locations. By working alongside civil society and NGOs, we believe that we can play positive role in building a sustained, resilient communities. Across APAC, we donated approximately 1.37 million cans of emergency drinking water in 2020. Circular packaging. These are the key numbers we focus on to track progress on the results of our multiple initiatives. 53.3% of our volume was in returnable packaging, and 46.3% of our packaging was made from recycled content. The increasing of recycled content not only helps in this goal, but also in carbon emissions.
Finally, climate action. We are committed to reducing carbon emission by 25%. Today, we have reduced 10.2% in terms of kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent per hectoliter compared to our 2017 baseline across our value chain. We deployed 216 alternative energy vehicles in China, including five hydrogen fuel cell vehicle trucks, which are empowered by cutting-edge technology to reduce carbon emission. We are proud of this achievement, as it is a first mover with an AB InBev group's global network and in China's beer industry. At our Ziyang brewery in China, we were able to switch to 100% renewable electricity, being the first in the Chinese beer market industry to accomplish and setting the benchmark for future facilities. As mentioned, our carbon reduction ambition is across the whole supply chain. We have been partnering with Huaxing, one of our key glass suppliers.
Based on our best practice sharing, they have decided to install solar panels in seven big furnaces, further reducing their footprint. We thank them for their partnership. In APAC, we have two pilots through our 100+ Accelerator program, Erthos and Shianco, which I'll discuss more next. It is only through collaboration and sustainability that we can solve problems. Through our 100+ Accelerator program, we look for partners who can deliver breakthrough advancements. Below is an example of a success story in APAC. Previously known as EcoPackers, Erthos has been working together with us to eliminate plastic keg caps used in India by developing eco-resin from agriculture byproducts, which are 100% compostable replacement to traditional materials used for manufacturing keg caps.
Some key highlights from these were that we did a pilot test in India with four eco-resin samples to discover the best eco-resin to be used to replace our keg caps. In addition to our global Accelerator, we also launched our very own Budweiser APAC Procurement & Sustainability Innovation Hub to empower entrepreneurs who are solving challenges in and for our communities in APAC. Below are three examples. Logistic resource synced with market solution of spare resource sharing by Cardinal Operation in China converted spent malt into beer cups, coaster, and ice buckets in India. In South Korea, energy bars, Oola bars made from saved grains, one of our beer byproducts, through our online crowdfunding platform. Another key highlight story I can share from our 100+ Accelerator is Yushuo, the provider for the power storage solution by reusing retired batteries from EV trucks.
This completes the missing piece of the puzzle for our whole renewable energy solution. In Foshan brewery, we installed solar since 2019. This year, we launched 30 electrical heavy trucks in China and four in Foshan. The power storage system can store the renewable electricity from solar systems that cannot be consumed by our brewery, which then charges our EV trucks after. When the EV trucks retire, the battery from them can then be the materials for our next power storage system, extending the life of the battery for another five years. Due to COVID-19, we faced unprecedented challenges. If there's anything we have learned, that is our 2025 sustainability goals are the right one, and that now more than ever, we must focus on building long-term resilience by working together.
Now, I hand over to Linda, our Chief People Officer for Budweiser APAC, who will share more on our social aspect.
Thank you, Emily, for sharing what we have done in sustainability. Now, I am going to talk about our work in the community and our Dream- People-Culture . We believe that drinking beer should be a positive experience. We engage with multiple stakeholders in achieving our smart drinking goals. Since 2016, we have been collaborating with public health experts to help reduce the harmful use of alcohol around the world. Our aim to social norms, to increase both social norms and individual behaviors to reduce the harmful use of alcohol across our markets in dedicated social market campaigns and related programs by the end of 2016. We have done several marketing campaigns. Smart drinking, no drinking, driving in China, smart campaigns in Korea, drink wiser in India, and so on. We have invested more than $16 million in 2020 to build smart drinking awareness and shift consumer behavior.
More than 7,500 million media impressions have been generated across APAC last year. Our non-alcohol beer and low-alcohol beer aims to ensure non-alcohol and low-alcohol beer products represent at least 20% of our total beer volume by the end of 2025. Our portfolio for this has more than 880 offerings for different consumer locations. Hoegaarden Rosée 0.0, Harbin 0.0, Cass 0.0 , all for you to choose your cup of beer. We aim to place guidance labels on 70% of eligible beer volume in APAC by the end of 2020 and increase alcohol health literacy by the end of 2025. At the end of 2020, our use of the guidance labels in APAC reached 70%, which exceeds our expectations. We are encouraged by our results. But here at Budweiser APAC, we are never satisfied, and there is more work to be done to raise awareness and create value for our consumers.
As a leading beer company with significant operations of road transportation fleet, one of our top priorities here is improving road safety. We launched the first Chinese translated edition of Management Practices for Safer Roads toolkit, which was co-developed by AB InBev Group and the United Nations Institute for Training and Research in November 2020. The toolkit is empowered by digital innovation that helps detect hazardized and critical locations where extremely number of serious crashes and framework corrective measures. Throughout this year, we have been recognized for our contribution. Our Harbin virtual idol, Hajiang, as a virtual road safety ambassador, helped us win the award of road safety innovation by the China Ministry of Public Security. In India, we participate in safer roads for girls initiative, where we won the prestigious Gold SABRE APAC award.
As Budweiser APAC, we believe that we can play a positive impact in helping our communities prepare and respond for disaster by working with the different organizations. For example, we donated CNY 11 million during the COVID-19 outbreak, which is including supply of protective masks and sanitizers to Wuhan charity foundations in China. Over 250,000 cans of water to isolation centers in Vietnam. KRW 1 billion worth of masks and aids to Daegu in South Korea. Donated approximately 58,000 bottles of water to Hope Bridge Korea Disaster Relief Association for the victims affected in typhoon area in Korea. And our colleagues in Vietnam donated VND 150 million to help people in the flood disaster area. We have been contributing to the community building, whatever our business goals. For example, we have committed to donate to the establishment of Hope School in each Chinese city where we build a brewery.
To date, we have 29 Hope Schools donated in China, with two more under construction. So far, we have 8,600 students and more than 900 teachers benefited from this. Volunteer and helping our community is one of the best way to bring people together for a better world. We have implemented several initiatives such as poverty alleviation programs to help farmers in their cultivation technology and sales channels in China. Our projects support more than 38,000 farmers. At Budweiser APAC, we are contributing to more than 64,000 hours in volunteer in 2020. Next, I'm going to move on discuss the Dream-People-Culture. Well, in Budweiser APAC, dreaming bigger is our DNA. Our people are our biggest asset, and we strive to acquire and retain the best talent through engagement, development, and respect for all.
Our talent attraction philosophy is to hire high potential talent for entry and mid-management levels and develop them for leadership positions. We aim to source and promote our leadership positions from within. It's worth noting that our employee branding has been able to attract more than 50 females for our leading graduate programs, an increasing of 15 percentage points for externally- hired female talent. Our employee feedback also is important to help us to continuously improve. We conduct annual engagement surveys, along with periodic pulse surveys will help us [audio distortion] and help achieve outstanding results. Our engagement surveys have improved to 90%, which is 20% above industry norm, and improved compared with 2019 of 3%, which is help us to continue to effort to improve our engagement pace.
Also, we receive a high level of trust that 91% of employees felt optimistic about our future, which is a 4% increase compared with last year. Our leading and development platform offers our employee and the company a resources for sustainable development and continuous learning. Our AB InBev University is an internal career acceleration centers that partners with the global leading business school and technical schools to develop a program to better prepare them for current and future challenges. More than 3,000 colleagues have attended classroom training programs, and more than 15,000 colleagues attend online learning. The health and wellbeing of our colleagues are important to our company and for our success. Therefore, in China, we launched our new wellbeing program, We've got you covered!, centered around four pillars of wellbeing: physical, behavior, financial, and social.
This program gives our colleagues the tools and resources to be healthy, resilient, and be success, both at work and home. We strive to foster an inclusive workplace and increase employment of the women and the group across our different markets. In Budweiser APAC, we have an inclusive and diverse workforce, where we have more than 20 nationalities and 29% of female colleagues. We view the diversity and inclusion working development by continuous working towards hitting our diversity inclusion ambition. Throughout the year by monthly best practice sharing sessions among different business units to promote equality in advance, opportunities, and focus inclusive workforce were helped by the people team. We aim to close the gender pay gap. Therefore, we commissioned Mercer, a work-class compensation specialist, to conduct a survey. It was found that our gender pay gap is currently at -3%.
We have ambitions to target to close the gender pay gap by less than 1%. To achieve this, there are four means. Corrective actions. Remediation plan across two to three years window to set up. To close the gap by targeting and improving our actual salary review mechanisms. Sustainable plan. Measures have been taken to ensure that all our compensation cycle applies rate and all have an equal chance to increase their compensation based on our principles of meritocracy. We believe the actions we are taking today will help to progress in the results we aim to achieve going forward. Having a great representation of diverse perspective across our workforce and our promotional programs enable us to better meet the needs of our diverse consumers and grow for the next 100+ years. We will continue to increase D&I within our company across our value chain.
I will now pass over to Craig, our Chief Legal Affairs Officer for Budweiser APAC, who will discuss what we have been doing on the governance side. Craig, over to you.
Thank you, Linda. Good morning and good afternoon, everyone. I will now discuss the last portion of the presentation, which is corporate governance. We are a company of owners, and we operate with high levels of accountability and take a long-term view of how we manage our business. To achieve our purpose of bringing people together for a better world, we have defined clear responsibilities supported by strong oversight systems to integrate sustainability throughout our business. Our senior management members are responsible for ensuring that our business can achieve sustainability in the long term. During the year, we assessed and reshaped the integration of ESG factors into our corporate culture, business strategy, and executive compensation plan to ensure sustainability is embedded in all of our operations. A materiality assessment was carried out to identify key topics that are the most relevant to the business.
Here you can see the material topics that are aligned with our company's values and current priority area. We are honored to have a reputable and experienced board of directors. Our board consists of seven directors, one executive director, three non-executive directors, and three independent non-executive directors. We are committed to achieving the highest board efficiency and maximizing shareholders' value. Apart from providing high-level oversight of the management and operations, the board also advises on business planning and strategic direction. Our BrewRIGHT system is an award-winning, state-of-the-art analytics platform for detecting and addressing compliance risk. We have spent several years developing machine learning technology that can identify risky business partners and potentially inappropriate payments, such as third-party due diligence, which reviews the vendor master list. Diligence accuracy, which helps to track vendors after the approval process.
Travel and entertainment, which compares expense spending. A nd data pollution, which assesses data quality across our enterprise resource planning systems. To ensure that we uphold our commitments to our stakeholders and work towards common goals together, we've developed and implemented a host of ESG policies. As ESG issues are always evolving, we keep monitoring the latest trends and issues and ensure that we act accordingly to meet the highest local and international standards. Our purpose is to bring people together for a better world. I'm proud of Budweiser APAC for continually achieving regional and international accolades. These are just some of the awards that we have recently received. I'm excited to be a part of a growing team that dreams big and continues to challenge the status quo as we continue to grow for the next 100+ years.
I hope that we've given you a better understanding of what we've done on the ESG front. With that, next would be to answer any questions that you may have. Thank you.
The floor is now open for questions. Please enter your questions in the Q&A box on the webcast screen.
Thank you, Desmond. I will be coordinating for the Q&A session. The first question here that we received is, how do you engage your workforce in ESG sustainability? Thank you for the question. ESG-related topics have been well integrated in our daily operations. The sustainability KPIs, for example, they are cascaded all the way from senior leaders down to the brewery operators, field sales colleagues, procurement teams, as part of the normal target-setting and cascading process that we have within Budweiser APAC. For example, when you look at total energy usage and water usage, these KPIs are shared with our colleagues in the different breweries that we have. Or when you think about route optimization and fuel efficiency, this target will be shared with the logistics and the procurement colleagues.
Or, for example, targets on compliance, whether it is benchmarking to local standards and global standards and regulations. These will be shared with the legal and compliance team members. Next to that, if you think about target setting is kind of the first part of the answer. But I would say that next to that, we of course, take advantage of the fact that we are a real Asian company. We share best practices between the different countries. To give you one example of that, when we look at returnable bottles, our colleagues in China will share best practices with our colleagues in India to improve the return rate. There is a lot of best practice to share on that. That, of course, increases and improves the environment, but also helps us to keep our costs low.
We focused on embedding ESG into our business. Actually, our teams are quite excited and passionate about the topic, and we support it both with the target- setting and the best- practice- sharing routines that we have in the company. Let me take the next question. What carbon-related KPIs do you have in Budweiser APAC? Could you share some examples of your milestones? For this one, I'll hand it over to Terry.
Currently we already having 10.2% carbon reduction compared to our baseline year, which is 2017, and three breweries achieved RE100. They are Ziyang brewery in 2020, Wuhan and Kunming in 2021. We have three dimensions to achieve carbon neutral. The first one is to improve energy efficiency and not only inside of our brewery, but also impact the whole industry. For instance, we are working with the key cooler brand to speed up the efficiency upgrade in China. Second, to reach the RE100. We are driving more on-site renewable electricity systems in our breweries. By now, we have 10 breweries powered by solar, seven in China, one in India, three in Vietnam. We will keep using [inaudible] in more breweries to reach RE100. Even further, we are working and pushing with our key suppliers to set up their SBTi goals and driving RE100.
The third one is to have an alternative solution for other energy. Just more sustainable energy solutions. For instance, biomass, biogas, green hydro. Besides that, the green logistics, of course, is a part of the solution. Thank you.
Thank you, Terry. Let's go to the next question. How is your senior management's compensation linked to ESG? What KPIs do you have? For this one, I'll maybe go to Craig. Craig, do you want to take this question?
Sure. Thanks, Jan. Yes, the answer is, senior management compensation is linked to ESG. Every year, we actually assess and we shape the integration of ESG into our executive compensation plans. A cross-functional team has KPIs. This includes sustainability and procurement, includes legal and corporate affairs teams, and then the different functional areas that are relevant as well. This was formed to actually manage and continuously improve sustainability performance. It is the team's compensation that is driven by these goals that we have.
Thank you, Craig. The next question is, could you elaborate on the diversity of your organization? Do you have any diversity targets? How do you train your leadership and employees? Maybe this one is for Linda.
Let me talk about the diversity first. I'll say, first one, that the diversity will provide a bias habit-breaking training to all our managers to improve the equity in the decision-making of the career growth of our employees. The second one is we also organize bi-monthly best practice sharing session of D&I initiatives between different BUs. More than 50 sessions of trainings, workshops, happy hours focuses on the D&I. Also we have a female leadership development and a career advancement w e organized across APAC. We have three sessions of unconscious bias training. We deliver to our people team to promote equal opportunity, equal employment for people of different genders, race, backgrounds, and experiences.
Thank you, Linda. The next question is, could you share some of your goals related to the water, such as water efficiency? This one I will give to Jan. Go ahead, Jan.
Thank you, Jan. Regarding water, it is our number one resource. It is not only essential for us, but also for the communities where we live in. It is probably our most complex goal because it is not one size fits all. There is not one single solution that we can come up with. We are a global company, of course, and we need to understand the local challenges and our communities, and that is why we need to deliver specific and impactful plans. We believe that with our 2025 water goal, we clearly have an industry-leading commitment to really drive improvement in the watersheds where we operate in. First of all, we have improved efficiencies internally within our own walls, where we reduced the water consumption of 2.99 hL of water per hectoliter of beer to 2.47 hL.
It is a reduction of 17%, more or less compared to 2017, which is our base year. Of course, we are not stopping there. We keep on testing innovations to further reduce that consumption in our roadmap. On the other side, we also have the outside of our breweries, and there we drive multi-stakeholder collaboration, where we need to look at the water scale and the water access, which is much bigger. There we are working with CSR projects and other companies. There we go beyond the individual companies sponsoring those projects and the communities. The key to scale and to accelerate those external projects is through real partnerships. A few examples of those partnerships are Enel, Proforest, and EcoVadis. We closely monitor those watersheds together with those partners, and we close them depending on additional recharge, relevant water table of the watershed of the aquifer.
The way we measure it depends a bit on the location because local legislation or external stakeholder requirements are different location by location.
Thank you, Jan. Next question is, it was impressive to learn about your 2025 sustainability goals. How do you track and monitor these goals? For this one, I will take it myself. We have set goals that are material to our business and where we know that we have kind of the most impact. What we do is that, we use the same process for all our targets, which we develop clear KPIs. We cascade them through all the business, and then it becomes part of our annual target- setting and cascading process. If you want to track the results, our results and the progress on our goals, they are disclosed every year in our ESG report, which is on annual basis. We just released our second report recently. Then, of course, our ownership mindset and our culture, which is very results-oriented.
Basically brings the same rigor to our ESG commitments as what we do to any other part of the business initiatives, because they are treated really in the same way. The next question is about ABI having majority of the AB InBev shares, how do you protect the interest of the minority shareholders? For this one, I will pass it to Craig.
Great. Thanks, Jan. T his is one that we spend a lot of time, especially at the time of the IPO, thinking about. Clear answer is that there is a really clear delineation between the business of ABI and Budweiser APAC. That is along geographical and market focuses. We actually have a non-compete agreement between the two entities. Budweiser APAC is ABI's primary exposure to the APAC territories, so our interests are aligned there. We also have three independent directors who very much ensure good corporate governance and objectively monitor and give independent views if and when a conflict of interest arises.
We have also, just as a further protection for minority shareholders, at Budweiser APAC have adopted the shareholders communication policy, and we are committed to providing timely access to our strategy, performance, and other material information so that all of our shareholders can exercise their right in an informed manner. Thank you. Back to you, Jan.
Thank you, Craig. The next question is, Budweiser APAC has a large organization operating in many regions across Asia. How do you ensure the human rights across your organization? For this one, maybe Linda?
Thank you for the question. I think, first one, respecting the human rights is a non-negotiable commitment to our business. Budweiser APAC has three core policies that continue our approach to respecting human rights and labor rights across our operations and our value chain, including our employees, vendors, hotelers, and as well as our consumers. The first one is talking about the human rights policy. It sets out steps and expectations for respecting and promoting human rights, leaving our own company and not contribute to the violation of the human rights in our society. The second one, the responsible sourcing policy, is based on our human rights policy and enable us to update our principles throughout our value chain.
The third one is the whistle-blowing policies, under which we set a whistle-blow hotline run by an independent third party, which is allowing us, for those within and outside of the company, to report on suspected breaches of the policies with the option to do so anonymously. On top of this, we believe that technology and digital innovation offers significant opportunity to enable companies to strengthen our approach to respect human rights, in particular to help increasing transparency with potential affect stakeholders. We continue to participate in industry and NGO initiatives that seek to improve business approach to respecting human rights. In 2019 and to the year today, there was no non-contract cases with significant impact related to child and forced labor in Budweiser APAC.
Thank you, Linda. The next question is, what are your water high-stress areas? How do you control them? This one, maybe I'll give to Terry.
Thank you. Budweiser APAC regularly updates its water risk assessment, o ur brewing and other manufacturing facilities based on short-term and long-term risk. First, we apply the World Resources Institute, WRI, Aqueduct tool, and then we are using AB InBev's custom-made water risk tool to guide sites through detailed questions on water availability, quality, regulatory pressure, and the reputation risk. We undertake an in-depth assessment of each facility once a year with a quarterly review with our key internal stakeholders if any change in risk profile. We believe it is with focus we will achieve results, and while we classify our risk to know where we should prioritize our effects. Of course, our water effects are not limited to our high-risk sites. We classify our sites from very high risk to low risk. So far, we do not have any very high-risk sites in our operation across APAC.
We have identified five high-risk sites that are waiting to improve the water availability and quality for the communities around those breweries. Thank you.
Thank you, Terry. Let us look what the next question is. See if there is a next question. The next question is, how did you support the communities and the partners, especially during COVID-19 period? This one may be for Linda.
Thank you for the question. We have been very passionate about empowering our communities, both large and small. We encourage those efforts through regional and local volunteering because we do our business in our local community and are committed to giving back to our local community. We have committed that in each city where we plan to build a brewery, donate for establishment of Hope School in China. We have completed the donations to build 29 Hope Schools in China, and another two are currently under construction. Throughout the year, these are the activities we carry out in those schools, such as basket for training champions, intelligent robot classrooms, development and protection activities. More than 8,000 students and teachers from those Hope Schools have benefited.
We believe we can play a very positive role in helping communities to prepare a response to disasters by working with government, society, and other entities. In 2020, we have donated more than $2.4 million worth cash and supplies to fight against COVID-19 pandemic in APAC. We have donated more than 1.3 million cans of emergency drinking water across APAC. We also encourage empowering communities through enormous volunteering opportunities. To demonstrate our commitment, we have implemented several initiatives such as poverty alleviation programs to help underprivileged farmers in their cultivation knowledge and sales channels in China. Half cost of [inaudible] program in Mongolia for 10 years. Innovative solutions to tackle age-old problems like preventing lack of the jobs and gender equities in India. We also have a key initiative, our smart drinking for youth.
We take our responsibility seriously to help reduce and prevent the harmful use of alcohol across our markets.
Thank you, Linda.
Thank you. We have the last question coming up.
Let's see what the last question is. Last question is, what is Budweiser APAC doing to reduce its fatality rate? Maybe this one also to Linda.
I will take the question. Here at Budweiser APAC, safety is at the heart of our culture. It ranks before results and targets. Before anything else, nothing should compromise the safety of our colleagues, consumers, and stakeholders. In an effort to ensure the safety of our employees, we have operational procedures and safety standards for our production processes, including fire safety, warehouse safety, work-related injuries, electricity safety, and emergency and activation procedures. We provide our employees with occupational safety education and training to enhance their awareness of safety issues. We have a technical committee to upgrade technical safety measures to meet industry-leading practices such as machine guarding and also use of the dust exposure prevention devices. The recorded injuries decreased by 23% compared to 2019.
The decrease was made possible by a further rollout of development and safety pillars of our global management name, VPO, and distribution process optimization, or DPO, across APAC, as well as investment in improving safety conditions in the facilities and the implementation of behavior safety programs. Last but not least, to help further reduce serious incidents and fatalities on roadways, we continue to develop our internal strategies and toolkits. For example, in China, we have joint sponsored the United Nations Road Safety and Digital Innovation Learning Conference to extensively explore digital innovations aiming to promote safer roads and reduce costs caused by accidents. Our Harbin virtual idol, Hajiang, as a virtual road safety ambassador also helped us win the award of the road safety innovation by China Ministry of Public Security.
In India, we participate in the safer roads for girls initiative, where we won the Gold SABRE APAC award.
Thank you, Linda. Desmond, over to you.
This concludes our Q&A session today. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Jan Craps for the closing remarks.
Thank you, Desmond. Here in Budweiser APAC, we are committed to growing a sustainable business together with our stakeholders, and we ensure that ESG is embedded into our daily operations. We've been in the Asia Pacific for more than 100 years, and we aim to thrive for the next 100 years and beyond. Thank you very much for your time. Stay safe and well. Cheers.
This concludes today's webcast. Please disconnect now. Thank you.