This Sustainable Development Report (hereinafter, this Report) is the ninth Report of the State Oil Company of the Republic of Azerbaijan (hereinafter, SOCAR) on Sustainability. With the publication of Sustainable Development Reports, our goal is to inform all our stakeholders about our economic, social, and environmental performance, as well as our approach to and principles for managing sustainable development activities throughout the year. The latest Report reflects the sustainable development performance in 2019 achieved by SOCAR’s subsidiaries and affiliates abroad, along with the Company’s structural units in Azerbaijan.

Applicable standards This Report has been prepared in accordance with the “Core” option of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Standards. The contents of the Report are based on the GRI principles of materiality, stakeholder inclusiveness, sustainability context, as well as principles of balance, comparability, clarity, timeliness, transparency, and reliability. The disclosure statuses of the GRI indices are provided in the Table on page 149.

SOCAR holds regular meetings with them and shares information through various mechanisms (see Table 24 for more details). To provide a comprehensive and transparent Report on the impact of our activities, the interests of both internal and external stakeholders and their comments made throughout the year were taken into account during the preparation of this Report. Further, in order to identify material topics and aspects, we analyzed the highlights of SOCAR’s activities in the mass media and sustainability reports of five international oil and gas companies, and held interviews with various stakeholders on a number of sustainable development areas. As a result of the analysis, material issues associated with SOCAR’s activities were identified and are illustrated in Figure 1. Moreover, Table 1 provides information on which aspects are the most important to SOCAR’s stakeholders.

This Report focuses on social, governance and environmental aspects as key elements of sustainability.