Governance and Strategy
Governance
Board of Directors
ASUS sustainability governance is directly overseen by the Board of Directors, with the Chairman assigning the Chief Executive Officers as the highest management executives responsible for sustainability management. The Sustainability and Green Quality Management Center has been established under the Co-CEOs. Because suppliers are strategic partners on which ASUS relies for product manufacturing, supply chain management is designated as a key sustainability governance topic. Accordingly, the Sustainability and Green Quality Management Center works with the procurement and outsourcing management departments to jointly manage supply chain processes, including the qualification review and approval of new suppliers, risk management for existing suppliers, and quarterly performance evaluations.
Corporate Sustainability Committee
To respond to sustainability trends and manage the associated opportunities and challenges, ASUS continues to deepen its sustainability governance structure and elevate the management depth and decision-making level of sustainability topics across the Group. In 2025, ASUS established the Corporate Sustainability Committee, comprising five independent directors and the two Co-CEOs. As the Company’s highest-level sustainability governance body, the Committee oversees the Group’s sustainability strategies, management mechanisms, and implementation results, and reports regularly to the Board of Directors to ensure the effective achievement of sustainability goals. Under the Committee, the Sustainability Center convenes quarterly meetings with sustainability management representatives from each subsidiary to jointly develop and implement action plans for Group-wide sustainability topics. Supply chain management is a key topic. Since 2025, subsidiaries have been required to introduce the RBA Code of Conduct, conduct on-site audits of key subsidiaries and track corrective actions, and use a platform to manage RBA and environmental footprint data for key subsidiaries, thereby ensuring consistently high standards for labor, health and safety, and environmental protection across subsidiaries and suppliers.
Sustainability and Green Quality Management Center
In 2009, ASUS established a dedicated sustainability unit, the Sustainability and Green Quality Management Center. The Chairman assigned the Chief Executive Officers as the highest-level management executives responsible for overseeing sustainability projects and progress toward targets for material topics. The Chief Sustainability Officer serves as the unit’s management representative and is responsible for monitoring and analyzing global sustainability trends and managing sustainability policy objectives and concrete actions. The Center monitors global sustainability developments, analyzes governance, environmental, and social topics, integrates the core business with product innovation and services, and establishes strategic sustainability directions and projects. It reports to the Board of Directors annually, submitting policy objectives, key sustainability programs, and performance results for review and approval, while the Board provides oversight and recommendations on implementation. For sustainable supply chain management, the Center has established the Supply Chain Code of Conduct and advances key topics including the protection of labor and human rights, responsible minerals procurement, and reduction of the manufacturing environmental footprint.
GreenASUS and SERASUS Committee
To facilitate horizontal coordination across business functions on highly impactful topics involving products, the supply chain, and organizational operations, ASUS established the GreenASUS Management Committee and the SERASUS Management Committee. Management representatives appointed by senior management are responsible for the Company’s ISO 9000 Quality Management System, QC 080000 Hazardous Substance Process Management System, ISO 14001 Environmental Management System, and other systems. The committees also regularly communicate information on environmental protection, safety and health, and management systems to all employees. Their members come from business operations, procurement, customer service, administration, legal affairs, and other departments. This cross-functional communication and coordination enables efficient resource allocation, aligns all ASUS employees around a common sustainability direction, and effectively integrates sustainability with the core business as a source of corporate competitiveness.
Strategy
According to estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the value of global ecosystem services amounts to USD 150 trillion, with approximately 47% of national GDP generated from services provided by biodiversity. However, the Intergovernmental Science- Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) has identified economic and social activities as major sources of pressure leading to environmental degradation. The key drivers include changes in land and sea use, climate change, direct exploitation of natural resources, pollution, and invasive species. Incorporating these five primary drivers of natural environmental loss into value chain risk assessment and management reviews can help mitigate the environmental impact of a company’s value chain.
According to McKinsey, more than 80% of Fortune 500 companies have set carbon reduction or net-zero targets, yet only 13%1 have established targets to reduce impacts on and restore biodiversity. In addition, global asset manager BlackRock stated in its article, Our Approach to Engaging on Natural Capital, that more than half of global GDP, approximately USD 58 trillion, is moderately or highly dependent on nature2, while only a small portion of the value of natural capital is fully reflected in market prices. As pressure on natural capital intensifies and related policies and regulations become increasingly stringent, asset prices will gradually adjust to reflect nature-related risks and opportunities. Accordingly, for companies whose supply chains depend heavily on natural capital, effective management of nature-related risks and opportunities has become a key factor in generating long-term financial returns.
ASUS recognizes natural capital—including land, water resources, biodiversity, and ecosystem services—as an essential foundation for sustainable business operations. To reduce the impacts of its value chain on nature and progressively advance toward the Nature Positive goal, ASUS established the ASUS Biodiversity Policy as the highest-level guiding principle for natural capital protection and biodiversity management. ASUS has developed a management framework encompassing risk identification, target management, management actions, and performance tracking, and promotes both management within the value chain and actions beyond the value chain. In alignment with the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), ASUS continues to advance natural capital conservation and restoration.
Within the Value Chain: Data-Driven Environmental Management
In addition to collecting data from its operational sites, ASUS uses its supply chain management platform and carbon data management platform to collect suppliers’ environmental footprint data, covering environmental factors such as GHG emissions, energy and resource use, water withdrawal, wastewater pollution, and waste treatment. This data provides a foundation for management decision-making. ASUS applies the Environmental Profit and Loss (EP&L) assessment, the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) guidance, and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) water risk screening tool to assess environmental transition risks at operational sites and across the supply chain. The EP&L assessment converts environmental impacts into monetary data to compare the magnitude of different environmental factors, while the TNFD guidance and WWF water risk screening tool help assess location specific risks at supplier sites. By integrating these analytical results, ASUS identifies high-risk suppliers and their risk types as the basis for subsequent target setting, tiered management, and resource allocation.
The analysis indicates that GHG emissions cause the greatest impact. ASUS separately discloses its climate risk management actions and responses in its TCFD Report. Freshwater resources represent the second-largest impact. ASUS conducts biodiversity mapping analyses of suppliers with high levels of freshwater withdrawal and discharge to identify those located in or near ecologically sensitive areas, assess their biodiversity management capabilities, and promote follow-up improvements to enhance biodiversity management performance.
Beyond the Value Chain: Proactive Biodiversity Restoration
ASUS also supports the Nature Positive initiative and designs projects based on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Global Standard for Nature-based Solutions (NbS). Beyond its value chain, ASUS carries out habitat restoration and species conservation through the Dasyuehshan Middle-Altitude Pangolin Habitat Enhancement and Conservation Project and the Chenglong Ricefish Survey, Research and Conservation Project, with the aim of enhancing habitat quality, ecosystem integrity, and species diversity. In addition to reducing environmental impacts through management within its corporate value chain, ASUS extends its efforts beyond the value chain to further promote ecosystem recovery and enhancement.
Defining the Dimensions and Scope of Natural Capital Impacts
ASUS identifies the impacts of value chain operations on natural capital in two categories: natural capital depletion and environmental quality degradation. These can be further divided into two dimensions: raw material extraction and the environmental impacts of value chain activities:
(1) Natural Capital Depletion: Raw Material Extraction and Use
The greatest impact of ASUS products on natural capital comes from the extraction of raw materials within the supply chain, such as minerals and forest resources. According to the 2021 report by the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT), a voluntary environmental labeling program, electronic products contain 40 types of critical metals. For example, metals account for approximately 70% of the raw materials in laptops and as much as 79% in desktops. The mining of these metals causes large-scale environmental destruction, alters landscapes and terrain, affects natural scenery, and severely disrupts local biodiversity balance. Research indicates that upstream mining industries have a biodiversity pressure index of 6%, while logging industries score as high as 11%, with the main sources of impact being the overexploitation of natural resources and changes in land use.
2) Environmental Quality Degradation: Environmental Impacts of Value Chain Activities
The negative environmental impacts of ASUS operations mainly include air pollution, water pollution, and solid waste emissions. These pollutants directly affect the quality of natural habitats and degrade the conditions needed for species to survive. At the same time, the availability of water resources poses an increasing annual risk to the electronics manufacturing industry. 《The UN World Water Development Report 2023》 estimated that nearly half of the world’s population would face severe water scarcity by 2030 and that the urban population facing water scarcity in 2050 would be twice that of 2016. Extreme climate conditions intensify fluctuations in water availability: for every 1°C increase in global average temperature, water resources decrease by 20%, and nearly three-quarters of natural disasters from 2001 to 2018 were water-related《. The Global Water Bankruptcy 2026 Report》, published by the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, further states that water management is shifting from a state of water stress to water bankruptcy, with long-term over-extraction in some river basins causing irreversible impacts on local ecosystems and the environment. The international voluntary environmental labels EPEAT and TCO have begun strengthening their water management requirements and encouraging electronics supply chains to adopt more proactive water management measures.