The Group is committed to environmental protection. It makes efficient use of resources, promote green awareness within the Group, follows eco-friendly management practices and supports community events to build a green living environment.

Emissions

Electricity is the key source of energy for our business and our major source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Other minor sources of emissions include our transport vehicles and standby emergency generators.

SmarTone has successfully improved its energy efficiency by deploying the latest technologies in its mobile network. By modernizing base station hardware and software, we achieved a 25% energy efficiency improvement. Additionally, SmarTone utilized an AI-based solution to dynamically adjust power consumption based on traffic pattern, resulting in further 11% energy efficiency gain without compromising network performance. These combined effort has led to an impressive overall energy efficiency improvement of 36%, demonstrating SmarTone’s commitment to sustainability and minimizing energy consumption. The new generation of base station equipment is being deployed in our network phase by phase according to the network upgrade plan and technology evolution.

The Group incorporates energy efficiency in the design and operations of its cell sites, switching centers and data center. We are deploying new generation of radio base station equipment with lower power consumption and higher tolerance to ambient temperature. We have converted some of our cell sites to non-air conditioned sites. For cell sites that still require air-conditioning, we deployed inverter-type air conditioners to reduce the power consumption on air-conditioning.

For switching centers, we replaced traditional chiller systems with Oil-Free Variable Speed chillers which could achieve 30%-50% efficiency improvement. We also optimized the ambient temperature of our data center for maximum energy saving while keeping healthy operations of the servers and devices.

Use of resources, the environment and natural resources

In addition to our efforts in reducing power consumption by our cell sites, switching centers and data center, we also demonstrated our environmental concern through efficient use of resources in our daily operations.

Our entire line of retail shops uses a wirelessly operated customer management system. Frontline colleagues use tablets to provide services to customers, including the use of e-Signature to replace paper for contract confirmation and the use of e-leaflets to replace paper-based promotional leaflets. The wireless system greatly reduces the use of paper in our sales process. We also established carbon reduction measures and progressively increase the use of high energy-efficient appliances in our daily operations to reduce carbon emissions.

Climate change management

Climate change is a global challenge that affects communities and businesses as a whole. One of the consequences of climate change is extreme weather events, such as hurricanes and flooding which may affect the Group’s daily operations. The Group has emergency plans to respond to possible disruptions in network and business operations. It also makes every endeavor, as mentioned in previous paragraphs under this section, to run an environmental-friendly and low-carbon emission business to help fight against global climate change.