Welcome to the Budweiser Brewing Company APAC ESG webcast. Hosting the webcast today from Budweiser APAC are Mr. Jan Craps, Co-Chair of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, Frank Wang, Chief Legal and Corporate Affairs Officer, Jan Clysner, Vice President of Procurement and Sustainability, and Diane Wauters, Director of Sustainability. Materials of this webcast can be found on Budweiser APAC's 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 and A box on the webcast screen at any time. Before proceeding, let me remind you that some of the information provided during this results call, including our answers to your questions on this call, 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. It is possible that Budweiser APAC's actual results and financial condition may differ, possibly materially, from the anticipated results and financial conditions indicated in these forward-looking statements. Budweiser APAC is under no obligation to, and expressly disclaims any such obligation to, update the forward-looking statements as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. For a discussion of some of the risks and important factors that could affect Budweiser APAC's future results, see risk factor in the company's prospectus filed with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on September 18, 2019, and the 2019 annual report published on March 17, 2020. It is now my pleasure to turn the conference over to Mr. Jan Craps. Sir, you may begin.
Thank you, Desmond. Good morning. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining our ESG webcast. I hope you are safe and well. We are excited to share with you how ESG has been embedded in our business, our commitments towards these topics, and our progress so far. I will give you a brief overview of our company, then turn it over to Diane to talk about sustainability and Frank to talk about community engagement and governance. We will all be joining you for Q and A after. Let me first briefly introduce Budweiser APAC to you. 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 2019, we approximately had 28,000 colleagues representing over 25 nationalities and speaking more than 40 languages. About 40% of our colleagues are females who are in important roles across different functions and markets. As many of you are aware, last year on September 30, we completed our IPO on Hong Kong Stock Exchange 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 decision-making process, enabling us to move fast with the consumers, and further expand our footprint 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 2019, we generated $2.1 billion of EBITDA, representing 11% organic growth year-on-year, and with a 32.4% EBITDA margin. We've maintained a strong balance sheet and cash flow generation. At the end of 2019, our free cash flow was $768 million. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, we raised our cash position to approximately $1.3 billion at the end of June 2020. The purpose of our company has been bringing people together for a Better World in a safe and responsible way. It is what beer has been doing for centuries. It's something that is enduring and is now even more relevant than ever. No matter good times or challenging times, we act together with our consumers, our colleagues, business partners, and communities to build a sustainable future. Supporting our purpose, our 10 principles on Dream, People, Culture are the backbone of our company.
We start with dreaming big. Our dream is to build a profitable growth company. We are Asia's leading and most profitable beer company, and we are passionate about growth. Our greatest strength is our people, and we are measured by the quality and diversity of our teams. We believe diversity leads to better decision-making and better results. We want all colleagues to feel respected and empowered to bring their authentic selves to work every day. Moreover, we are a company of owners. We are united by our strong culture, which is a key element of our success. Owners take results personally and lead by example. Whether it's market-facing or internal ways of working, we constantly strive to deliver greater value to our consumers, customers, and business partners while maintaining sustainable top-line growth in a healthy way. True owners never take shortcuts.
We are deeply connected to communities across the region and want to be part of the solution where it matters so we all thrive. Our reputation is the outcome of doing the right things in a consistent way. That's how we build a company to last. Long before we became a publicly listed company, we had integrated ESG related topics into our daily operations. Our commitments and efforts in these topics are even more relevant now with the COVID-19 pandemic. As part of the AB InBev network, we share the same 2025 sustainability goals in smart agriculture, water stewardship, circular packaging, and climate action. Diane will take you through the details of these goals and our initiatives in Budweiser APAC next. After that, Frank will talk about the social and governance pillars.
We've had long established programs in both pillars, which have been well-recognized by local stakeholders across our markets. Let me now turn it over to Diane.
Thank you, Jan. Good morning. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Diane Wauters. I'm leading sustainability for Budweiser APAC, and would like today to walk you through our sustainability strategy, our key goals, and progress so far. For me, working in sustainability is not only doing what's good for business, embedding purpose in what we do, and building reputation, but it's walking the talk. It's acting as an owner and striving to make the world a better place. As we like to say, sustainability isn't just part of our business, it is our business. We are working together with teams across Budweiser APAC, from marketing to supply to finance to people, to embed sustainability in all we do. Here you can see those are the key drivers, four reasons for our focus on sustainability.
First, it's about sourcing the highest quality ingredients, being efficient, resourceful, and effective with our resources, ensuring supply security and business continuity. Second, it's about our people, our colleagues, who are seeking that sense of purpose, pride to work with us. It's not only critical when you want to attract the best talent, but also to keep them engaged for the long run. We truly believe that our greatest strength is our people, as Jan just mentioned. Thirdly, we are seeing consumers asking more and more questions about environmental and social impact, and asking their favorite brands to step up in authentic, purpose-driven ways. For example, recently you might have seen in China, our Budweiser brand has launched a campaign to tell the story of our commitment to 100% renewable electricity. Finally, sustainability is about innovation. It's about the future.
We know we need to think about and lead the way for the future of agriculture, packaging, logistic, and consumers, so our business and communities can continue to thrive for the next 100+ years. Now let's talk a little bit about our four goals. We have a long history of sustainability at AB InBev and Budweiser APAC, but our 2025 goals are our most ambitious yet. Not only addressing what's going on within our walls, but also ensuring that the communities and environments where we live and work are thriving and resilient. For example, if you look here at the water stewardship goal, you can see it's not only about the water efficiency in our brewery, which remains a key KPI we track, of course, but it's also about our community. Same for the smart agriculture goal. It's not only about the barley, but also the farmers.
I love this farmer-centric approach. For me, it's amazing to be part of a company that set this kind of stretch goal for itself, even if we don't have all the answers today. We want to remain ambitious and keep raising the bar, which is in our DNA. We have these four pillars that you can see here, agriculture, water, packaging, and climate, as we believe these are the areas that are close to our core business, and as such, we can have a real impact, bring the most value. They are core to our dream of building a profitable growth company, hence we are putting resources and efforts behind them. Now, let's quickly move to the key results.
I will deep dive in each goal later, but first, I thought we could quickly cover the key numbers to show you the progress we are making towards our 2025 goals. Let's start with smart agriculture. Following the harvest of May 2020 in India, we have today 92% of our farmers who meet our criteria for skills, which means that farmers have access to good barley varieties and technical training. We have 100% of our farmers who are connected, which means with whom we are regularly in touch to share insight and information on how to best grow the crop or about the latest market price or how to ensure health and safety on the farm, for example.
Then we have 83% of our farmers financially empowered, which means we help them to grow their business for the long term and ensure they have access to the financial tools they need. Now let's move to the second one, water stewardship. Water is the key ingredient in all our products, of course, so we value every drop. But more than just a key resource for our business, clean water is a critical resource for the well-being of our community. First, let's look inside our walls. Our breweries have been working for a long time on improving our water usage efficiency. We are very proud to be currently in APAC at 2.68 hectoliter of water per hectoliter of beer brewed, which is a 13% reduction since our baseline year of 2017. Second, let's look at what's happening outside our walls, more in our watersheds.
We also carefully allocate our resources to ensure we can create meaningful impact in the areas which need it the most. We regularly update our water risk assessment at Budweiser APAC from very high risk to low risk. As of today, we don't have any very high-risk sites in our operation across APAC or any high-risk sites in India. We are focusing really our efforts in India, engaging with the local community in our five high-risk sites through local partnerships to ensure we maximize the impact there for the local community. Then finally, we also produce emergency drinking water and cans, leveraging our packaging lines, and we distribute them for emergencies such as floods, pandemics, or selected events during which access to drinking water is a challenge for our community.
In the first half of this year, we have distributed close to 500 dozen of them around APAC. Now let's have a quick look at circular packaging. These are the two key numbers we focus on to track progress on the results of our multiple initiatives. 67% of our beer is packaged in returnable packaging, such as returnable glass bottles and kegs. We have 47% of our packaging material made of recycled content, which is a combination of the cullet percentage we have in our glass bottles and the recycled content of our cans. Last but not least, climate action. Climate action is articulated around two key areas. First, we are committed to reduce our carbon emission by 25%.
We are today at a reduction of 13% for Budweiser APAC across our value chain, which means across scope one, two, and three, and very confident to achieve our goal by 2025. Second, the renewable electricity. We are today at 16% contracted versus a 100% goal by 2025. We do acknowledge we have more work to do here, while we are also cautious about making the right business decision for the long term. We don't want to become 100% at any cost, hence our teams in each country are working with partners and local governments to drive changes in current legislation that are required to allow the greater adoption of renewable electricity. As such, we will really expedite our progress in this area as well.
I will now deep dive in each of those four goals because you have a few key numbers in mind before we do so. Also, I would like to show you a little bit the partnership and focus areas we have to ensure we will reach our 2025 goals. Let's start with smart agriculture. As I mentioned before, we have taken a farmer-centric approach for our smart agriculture growth and are investing in agronomic guidance and field-level advice in order to improve farmer practices, lowering our environmental impact while improving farmer productivity and ensuring our farmers produce quality raw materials, as such, securing our supply of quality barley. In India, for example, we currently work with more than one dozen farmers.
We have an agro team on the field that visits each of our farmers several times a year to advise them, train them, skill them. It was really amazing to see the agility of the team this year who supported our farmers during harvest and barley procurement during lockdown. The digitalization journey we have started in our barley supply chain, notably with KisanHub, has really helped us to stay connected with our farmers all along, advising them on how to best store the grains or ensuring procurements won't get interrupted even in the midst of the challenges of a pandemic.
When we say it's all about the people, I truly believe so when I see our teams going above and beyond during this very challenging year to support our farmers, and as such, together build a resilient supply chain from ground up, which really makes us super proud. Now, I can talk for hours about the work we do with our farmers, but as time is limited today, let's watch together quickly a short video, and then I will move to our water stewardship goal. Let's now move to the water stewardship goal. As I mentioned earlier, water is the number one ingredient in all our products, but more importantly, a critical resource for our community.
Besides the water usage improvements we keep on driving in our brewery, here are a few examples of what we do to measurably improve water availability and quality in our high-risk sites in India, which I mentioned before, it is really where we focus our efforts right now. We, for example, build farm and village ponds, recharge shafts for increasing recharge potential, or check dams to collect water. This especially makes sense in a country like India, where during monsoon, you have a lot of water, but water is not necessarily equally distributed during the year. We also, for example, train our farmers to improve their irrigation practices. For each of those water activities, we build local partnerships to align what we do with the local needs, and as such, help our local communities thrive. For us, when our communities thrive, we thrive.
Let us now move to our third goal, circular packaging. I mentioned before the two key focus number, but let us here talk a little bit about our strategy and illustrate with four key words what we do at Budweiser APAC. Reduce, reuse, recycle, and rethink. Let us start with reduce. The biggest impact we can have is by not using. That is good for business and the environment, hence our focus to reduce packaging as we want to use the least material possible. We, for example, lead a continuous effort in light weighting, meaning reducing the weight of our bottles and cans in each of our markets by working very closely with our suppliers. Next comes reuse. For example, our glass bottles. We know for sustainability, returnable bottles are the best choice, and this also makes business sense.
Where possible, we try to convert a one-way bottle from our portfolio to returnable glass bottles. We have in APAC, as mentioned before, 57% of our beer packaged in returnable packaging and we will keep on working closely, notably with our bottle collectors in each market to ensure the bottles come back to us and are reused in the most efficient way. Now recycle. One of the big opportunities we have in Budweiser APAC is to increase the recycled content of our can sheets in China, which is very low today, around 6%. We are working together with one of our key suppliers, Nanshan, to influence the metal packaging industry and raise awareness on the potential opportunities in this industry. China being the largest can sheet producing country in the world. This improvement will have impact in China but also beyond.
Of course, we also want to keep leveraging our brands to connect with our consumers. For example, in Korea, earlier this year, we leveraged our Cass brand to launch the Can First Challenge on social media, and as such, incentivize our consumer to recycle their cans. Last but not least, rethink. We really want to keep challenging the status quo and be more innovative in our approaches when needed. We, for example, believe there is more we can do in our bottle supply chain in India to protect our returnable glass bottles and also impact the livelihood of our local waste pickers. Hence, we are starting a blockchain technology pilot to bring transparency and visibility to our supply chain and understand better where our action can be the most impactful. Now let us move to climate action.
Climate change is a pressing issue that affects many businesses, as you know, including ours and the communities where we operate. In the spirit of being part of the solution, we are building climate resilience by committing to reduce our emissions by 25% across our value chain by 2025. As you can see here on the left, the biggest opportunity in climate action sits in our value chain. In fact, 90% of our carbon emissions are scope three emissions, which means our indirect emissions from our suppliers. Another reason why sustainability and procurement go hand in hand, as a lot of changes can be driven by and in cooperation with our suppliers. We are working on several projects and pilots to transform our business and reduce our emissions. A quick example is what you can see here the picture.
Last year, we launched in partnership with Foshan Feichi, a hydrogen-powered truck for B2B deliveries in China, becoming the first beer company to use this technology in China. Let's talk a bit about 100% renewable electricity commitment. So far, we have one offsite solar farm in India, one in China, and we have also installed solar panels on 10 of our breweries, seven in China, two in Vietnam, and one in India. We know it's a journey. We are putting the necessary resources behind the challenge to increase our renewable electricity percentage by 2025 without taking any shortcuts, which is part of our DNA, as mentioned by Jan earlier. Sustainability is bringing a lot of opportunities to us, but we also know we don't have all the answers. As discussed during the presentation today, our suppliers are key partners in this journey.
Hence, we will continue to engage and closely collaborate with them. But also with startups, who can really challenge us with new ideas to transform our business and ensure to still be relevant 100 + years from now. We are actively looking to cooperate with the best partners who can deliver breakthrough advancements to tackle our sustainability challenge. It's with this mindset that we launch our 100+ Accelerator, and you can see a few logos here from startups that we brought in through the accelerator. I'll give you quickly two examples from pilots we did here in APAC. The first one in China. Yushuo aims to reuse retired batteries of vehicles for storing energy. What's amazing about this story is that we were able to give Yushuo the platform to run pilots as part of the accelerator, connect them with investors like the World Bank, for example.
Today, we can see them grow and create meaningful impact in the renewable energy space. It's very exciting to this kind of collaboration. The other startup that I mentioned before is KisanHub that we use in India in agriculture, and it's now used by 100% of our farmers. With this KisanHub platform, our government team on the field has live access to the data of all our farmers, which allows the team to analyze data, manage the quality and quantity of barley, as well as understand our farmers' needs better, truly digitally transforming our supply chain. In addition of our global accelerator, we also have launched our own Procurement and Sustainability Innovation Hub to empower driven and commitment entrepreneurs who are solving problems in the communities here in APAC. Sustainability is here to stay.
We believe at Budweiser APAC in taking responsibility and owning the results. That is why we are constantly raising the bar and are never satisfied with good enough. We know that together we can achieve a dream of a Better World. I will now turn it over to Frank to take you through the next two pillars of ESG.
Thank you, Diane, for sharing the highlights of our efforts in sustainability. Now I am going to talk about our work in community and governance. We believe every experience with beer should be a positive one. Over the decade, we have moved beyond awareness building to shifting social norms by smart drinking campaigns. Across our APAC operations, we hold annual Global Beer Responsibility Day activities with thousands of our colleagues participating. Specifically in China, we have held the smart drinking campaign for 13 years in partnership with government, NGOs, and public health, and behavior change experts. We are going to show you a short video on shifting consumer behavior and calling for smart drinking action. This is tailored to target Generation Z. We use an e-sport team, plus a celebrity, and a virtual idol to bring the message together with the traffic police.
Let us have a look. Done already? Okay. In addition to that, we have been offering more beer choices to customers, such as No-Alcohol and Low-Alcohol Beer. We call it NABLAB, which are currently available in most of our major markets. We aim to ensure NABLAB representing at least 20% of our total beer volume by the end of 2025. We believe in helping consumers understand why and how alcohol should be consumed, and the limits. As such, we have launched the guidance label product to share health information via packaging label and secondary label change. We are also committed to promoting responsible drinking and road safety, which collective action is very important. In particular, we have jointly sponsored the United Nations Road Safety and Digital Innovation Learning Conference in China to extensively explore digital innovations to promote safer roads and reduce casualties caused by car accidents.
Our having visual idol, Hajiang, as virtual road safety ambassador, the one you just saw in our video, also helped us win the award of Road Safety Innovation by China Ministry of Public Security. In India, we participated in the Safer Roads for Gurugram initiative, where we won the prestigious Gold Cyber APAC award. Apart from promoting responsible drinking, bring people together for a Better World has always been our purpose. We are passionate about empowering and supporting communities in which we operate, so far we have many ongoing projects to help the local societies. We believe we can play a positive role in helping communities to prepare and respond to disasters, working together with government, civil society, and other private sector organizations.
For example, during COVID-19 outbreak, we donated RM 11 million cash and medical supplies to Wuhan Charity in China, emergency drinking water to isolation centers in Vietnam, and KRW 1 billion worth masks and aid to Daegu in Korea. In addition to our ongoing disaster relief program, we donate hundreds of thousands of cans and bottles of emergency drinking water to communities who are in need. We have been actively participating in community building wherever our business goes. For example, we have committed to donating the establishment of a Hope School in each Chinese city where we build a brewery. So altogether, by far, we have 27 Hope Schools in China. Community engagement is another way to bring people together. We have implemented programs to help farmers in their cultivation technology and sales channels. For example, we plant Cass Forest of Hope in Mongolia for 10 years.
In India, we have also carried out various innovative solutions to tackle problems such as poverty, lack of jobs, and gender equality. They are very part of Better World platform that brings our commitments and actions to life, showing how we are building a business to last, bringing people together for a Better World for the next 100 years and more. Now let's move to governance. We strive to operate under a world-class compliance framework with best-in-class corporate governance standards. We carry ABI's well-established compliance framework with a comprehensive and practical code of business conduct and anti-trust, anti-corruption policy that apply to all colleagues and transactions. Our corporate governance charter, code of dealing, and board diversity policy ensure a strong and diverse board oversight through various committees headed by independent directors and board diversity policies. All together form our compliance framework.
Worth noting that as our parent ABI is listed on various stock exchanges, we are confident Budweiser APAC's compliance framework meets some of the highest standards globally. Historically, many companies have focused on investigating misconduct after it occurs. However, we spent several years developing machine learning technology that can identify risky business partners and potentially inappropriate payments. BrewRight is an analytics platform based on data extracted from all operations. This allows us to proactively monitor legal risks, prevent violations, and place the company at the forefront of corporate anti-corruption compliance. BrewRight allows Budweiser APAC to focus on front end, on prevention and detection, rather than focusing on investigating problems after they have arisen. The platform can pull data from more than 10 underlying systems and provide insights into business with a focus on ranking risky transactions and third-party vendors.
The platform allows the Budweiser APAC compliance team to identify and investigate suspicious or risky payments. The platform is designed to become smarter and more effective over time. We use machine learning and artificial intelligence to identify patterns in our everyday transactions to identify and rule out corruption, helping ensure we operate in a way that is ethically responsible across our company. In China, we launched the iCompliance project to systematically improve the compliance level of operations by leveraging the big data tools available in the market. The main objective is to integrate internal and external data into one platform to, A, monitor the risk and raise red flags on real-time basis, B, discover potential big region, and C, identify the conflict of interest, and lastly, D, verifying the authenticity and accuracy of data.
This project is still in process of implementation, and we expect to see its positive impact in the coming years. In addition, we are also 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 ensure utmost efficiency and benefits to the company and shareholders with diverse perspectives. Apart from providing high-level oversight of the management and operations, the board also advises on formulating the business planning and strategy direction. We are committed to diversity and inclusion in all aspects. We respect people of all backgrounds and believe that the diversity of thought can help us deliver better decision-making and achieve better results. Our focus has always been attracting, hiring, engaging, developing, and advancing the very best talent, regardless of gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other characteristics.
We have a diverse team, and we are improving year after year at all levels in our organization. Moreover, our brands and value chain are agents of change in driving D&I, and we support relevant initiatives in society to inspire action. As I have said earlier, our purpose is to bring people together for a Better World. Through working with our people and communities, operating under the well-established world-class standards, we believe we can play a positive role in contributing to the world and make Budweiser APAC and [Distell Group] leading multinational company in APAC. We are proud that Budweiser APAC has been well-recognized, and this slide shows some awards we have received recently. We hope we have given you a better understanding of our ESG efforts comprehensively. With that, we are here to answer any questions you may have.
The floor is now open for questions. Please enter your questions in the Q and A box on the webcast screen.
All right. The first question, what is your most challenging goal in terms of sustainability? This one is maybe for Jan Clysner, if you want to take this one.
Sure. Our most challenging goal is definitely water stewardship. As Diane mentioned earlier, water is our resource number one. It is essential for our communities, but also for our own business. Water security is complex, and it is not one size fits all, not one single solution. That is why we need to understand, and we do understand the challenges of our communities, and we have to make sure that we deliver specific and impactful plans for those key regions. We also understand that to really drive change in this water stewardship, that we need multi-stakeholder collaboration. The key to scale and accelerate the impact is definitely through real partnerships. A few of those partnerships, a few examples of partners we work with in India is LetsEndorse and FORCE. These are key to make it happen.
Of course, we are very proud of the change and the impact that we have been making within our own breweries with a 13% reduction. But we are not stopping here, of course, so we are testing new innovations to further reduce that number of needed water per hectoliter of beer. Water stewardship is definitely our number one.
Okay. Next question, please. The next question is, how do you balance cost-cutting efficiency with the needed investment for sustainability? I can take that one. I think it is important to say there is not necessarily a contradiction between the efficiency needs, and investments for sustainability. Like we said in the webcast today, sustainability is our business, and we have set sustainability goals that are very material to our business, so that delivering on the goals actually makes business sense. At Budweiser APAC, sustainability is embedded within our procurement function, and that has enabled us to take a very pragmatic approach, very action-oriented, for sustainability. For example, if you look at our KPI for renewable electricity, this one will also help us reduce our cost of energy.
If you look at the KPI related to water, continuing to improve on the efficiency of water usage in our breweries, will also help us on the water KPI. We are looking as well at ways to optimize the byproducts of the brewing process so that we can minimize our footprints while contributing to a circular economy. All of these KPIs really have a pro-business approach, so that when we reach them, it also supports our business results. We believe the approach for sustainability goes beyond being efficient. It is also about being effective. When we focus on how we can be resourceful to deliver sustainable impact at a local level, by leveraging our core competencies, we also invest where it delivers the most value for our communities and our business. Let us maybe move to the next question.
How is Budweiser APAC addressing D&I, more specifically gender in leadership? Maybe, Frank, if you can cover this one.
Okay. Thank you. Very good question. Budweiser APAC is committed to a work environment that is both diverse and inclusive, where all colleagues feel respected and empowered to bring their authentic selves to work every day. We have adopted from AB InBev expanded the existing diversity and inclusion strategy beyond the workplace alone to encompass our broader value chain and community. The strategy sets goals, including attracting diverse talent, enabling our workforce to recognize bias, and creating an inclusive work environment. We have adopted the board diversity policy to recognize and embrace the benefits of a diverse board. We also updated and rolled out an anti-harassment and discrimination policy throughout our entire organization. In Budweiser APAC, we have a diverse workforce comprising more than 25 nationalities, speaking 14 languages. Currently, 40% of our salaried workforce are women, with 25% female representation among our partners.
Year- on- year, we are working to close the gap. We looked at list of initiatives to improve this, one of them being, which was the creation of a special Women in Leadership program with accelerated development for strong female talent. Throughout 2019, we organized bimonthly best practice sharing sessions of diversity and inclusion initiatives between different business units to ensure equality in advancement opportunities and foster an inclusive work environment in which our people can thrive. In 2020, we have reached a significant milestone in our diversity and inclusion journey with the creation of the diversity and inclusion committee across all of our business units in Asia-Pacific. Those committees have as Chairman, members of our top leadership teams and comprise colleagues who have volunteered to represent other colleagues to help us shape our journey.
We believe that one of our greatest strengths is our diverse team of people. Diversity and inclusion in our organization enables the diversity of thought needed to achieve exceptional results. Thank you.
Thank you, Frank. Next question. This is a question for Jan Clysner. As responsible for both sustainability and procurement, how do you balance your different KPIs? What are your KPIs both for Procurement and Sustainability?
As our sustainability goals are the ones which are material to our business, close to the core of our business, they have the most impact. As such, they also are translated in the targets that I have, that the rest of the team has. They are important, and my targets on sustainability cover our four goals, clearly. At the same time, I have goals that are with the more procurement-specific matters. But one doesn't go in conflict with the other. As Jan mentioned before, if we increase renewable energy, it's also good for our electricity bill because it goes lower. If we are more efficient with water, it's good for our cost as well. So both are important. They're definitely not in conflict, and both are so important because they're close to the core of our business.
Okay. Next question. How is your leadership engaged in ESG agenda? What are oversight and board engagements? I can take that one. Actually, ESG topics are well integrated in our daily operations. Our senior leadership team is responsible for different aspects of the topics, and they share some of the KPIs. For example, Jan just talked about his KPIs as the VP of Procurement and Sustainability. He shares his KPIs with the VP supply, so they work together on sustainability goals. Frank, here with us today as well, as the Chief Legal and Corporate Affairs Officer, he works together with the VP people on community engagement initiatives. For myself, I receive monthly updates on sustainability progress. We do semi-annual deep dives on the sustainability agenda.
Also at the board level, the board is actually very engaged on the topic of sustainability, understands the material issues in our business, and we update the board and the audit committee on a regular basis on sustainability matters. Also on the progress against the 2025 goals, including supply security, sourcing strategy, which are all informed by our longer-term sustainability efforts. Next question. This is a question on returnable bottles. Do you work with competition to come with one uniform bottle for the whole industry, for total China or India, or only for your own brands? Diane, do you want to take this one?
Yeah, sure.
Or Jan Clysner.
Both. I am fine to take it. I think what we do in the industry generally, sustainability is always with our partners, but then your bottles might have different specifications. We work with our bottle collectors. Changes we might bring for us might also impact the competitors, which at the end we want, right? We all have the same goals in the long term. Returnable, we do several things. One, I would say is closely working with the bottle collectors, but also then just generally on the supply chain, right? How can you avoid breakages? How do you make sure your bottles come back? How you can also work with the consumer to incentivize them to bring back the bottles so we can take and impact the broad industry as well. That could also potentially be a competitive advantage.
But maybe, Jan, you want to add something as well on this question?
Yeah, let me add one thing. I think there are two aspects to returnable bottles. One is the bottle itself, which is part of our brand. Those are unique. On the other side, there is the whole system that brings the bottle back, the bottle collectors. There, in essence, we do work together with competition because these are the same bottle collectors that collect bottles from wherever they are and bring them to the respective breweries. There, there is a cooperation, but it is via the bottle collectors.
Yeah. One thing I would like to add here is that, ABI has actively participated in this cooperation with all the beer players and the leadership of China Alcoholic Drinks Association, right? To have the unified new quality standard for the beer bottles, right? We have successfully convinced the glass industry, right? To produce a light and strong bottle for beer players in China. By doing that, we can save a lot energy to help protect the environment in China. I think that is a big progress we have made in China together with the industry.
Okay. Next question. "How do you engage your workforce in ESG and sustainability?" I can take that one. ESG related topics, they have been well integrated into our daily operations. I talked about the KPIs that are shared with our senior leaders, but they actually cascade down to brewery operators, to field sales colleagues, procurement teams, the legal teams, because we have a target setting and cascading process that takes care of that. For example, the colleagues working in breweries, they have KPIs on reducing total energy usage and water usage. If you look at logistics colleagues, they carry KPIs on route optimization and fuel efficiency. Legal and compliance colleagues, they have compliance KPIs to monitor the compliance with the global and local standards and regulations. We see the different aspects of ESG come back in the target setting and cascading process throughout the business.
We also set up that between different functions and countries, there is a best practice sharing, especially around the sustainability goals. For example, when we bought the SABMiller business four years ago in India, we did a big best practice sharing between the China team and the India team to improve the returnability of the bottles in India, to increase the return rates, which is good for the environment and also for cost management. When we do the World Environment Day and the Beer Responsibility Day, which are two fixed dates in the full-year calendar, we actually engage all our teams around Asia. For example, in China, a couple of weeks ago, we did a smart drinking campaign, which Frank showed the video a little bit earlier in the webcast.
On that day, we had more than 10,000 of our colleagues in China who went on the street to engage with communities and consumers, to talk about responsible drinking and bring the message. That is very engaging for our teams to be directly, personally engaged in interacting with consumers on these messages. Also, we empower our colleagues to deliver the commitments in the different functions and geographies and come with ideas that we can then implement around our different countries. It is actually quite engaging as a program. You would probably know that this topic is very personal for many of our colleagues and very engaging as well as a way to commit to our goals for both sustainability and smart drinking. Any other questions? So question on, "Can you elaborate on how sustainability measures could translate into improving business results?
For example, can you help to give some quantitative analysis of likely cost saving by converting an ordinary brewery into one using 100% renewable electricity?" Jan, can you talk a little bit more on when we shift from purchased electricity to renewable, what type of cost savings we can count on there?
I think the type of savings are very different country by country, region by region even, because different legislations are applicable there, both from a state grid and from what is possible in renewable. But somewhere 5%-10% is achievable. It depends a bit on the combination, how much solar, wind, and potential other alternatives are possible.
I think one of the big collaborations that is happening between the procurement and the legal and corporate affairs team is as well making sure that the regulatory environment evolves in the different countries to actually allow us and facilitate the setting up of renewable energy across more of our breweries. So we can go beyond putting the solar panels, and then actually enabling to go for 100% renewable, which already works in the Xi'an brewery, like Jan shared a bit earlier.
Yeah.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have time for only one more question.
A question for me. "Budweiser APAC board is majority ABI controlled, four out of seven. Will this change?" "The ABI CFO used to be part of the board. Given the importance as a platform for growth and majority shareholders, surprised the CFO is not part of the board anymore." As you probably know, ABI controls the majority of the board, but that's also because ABI is a majority shareholder. ABI holds around 87%, roughly, of the shares of Budweiser APAC. That is also the reason that there is a majority control of the boards. But we decided to put three out of the seven board members as independent board members.
You probably have seen by their profile that each of these independent board members actually adds a significant value add to the discussions and the decisions that the boards because of their specific expertise and experience that they bring to the table. We're very happy to have the contributions and the decisions of the independent board members in the boards for Budweiser APAC. It's true that a CFO used to be part of the board, Felipe Dutra. The reason that changed is that Felipe Dutra left AB InBev, and at that moment, we don't only look at the specific role of the ABI non-executive board member. We also look at the experience. You would have seen that at that moment, we decided to bring in both Nelson Jamel and Katie Barrett into the boards, which actually is quite interesting profile.
As you might have read, Nelson Jamel actually has a full career in finance. Nelson Jamel has been in different parts of the world, in VP Finance in Europe, but in VP Finance in Brazil, where he was also the CFO for Ambev. He actually has quite some relevant experience with this type of setup that we have with Budweiser APAC, because as you know, Ambev is in a very similar position with ABI as a majority shareholder and he used to be the CFO for Ambev. Before he became the CFO for Anheuser-Busch in North America, which arguably is the biggest part of the business in AB InBev. He's now the Chief People Officer, but he has a very extensive financial experience as a background.
Katie, of course, has a very big legal background because she is the Chief Legal Officer for AB InBev, and she again complements the experience in the boards, and also adds to the gender diversity. As you might have seen, we now have three out of seven female board members within Budweiser APAC. We are very happy with the board and also the experience that the different board members bring to the table. To be honest, I do not expect the majority of the boards to change in terms of ABI representation, of course, because ABI is a majority shareholder in Budweiser APAC. Thank you for the question, and I hand it back over to you, Desmond.
Thank you. This concludes our Q and A session today. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Jan Craps for the closing remarks.
Thank you, Desmond. At Budweiser APAC, we are deeply connected to communities across Asia-Pacific, and we have a well-integrated ESG into our daily operations. We are committed to building a sustainable, profitable, and growing business together with our consumers, our customers, business partners, and other stakeholders. We have been in Asia-Pacific for more than 100 years, and we aim to thrive for the next 100 years and beyond. Thank you very much for joining. Stay safe and well, and see you next time. Bye-bye.
This concludes today's webcast. Please disconnect now. Thank you.