Our corporate reputation, both locally and on the global stage, is intimately tied to how well we communicate with our stakeholders. We continuously provide important financial and operational details to the public, ensuring that complete, accurate and balanced information is disclosed openly and honestly.
Challenges
In order to gain and maintain near- and long-term public support, our various stakeholder groups need to understand the nature of our business, along with the risks and benefits. Corporate transparency is vital to ensuring the public can make sense of our activities, gauge our performance, and interact with the company in a meaningful way.
Transparent disclosure allows stakeholder groups to compare what we say about our strategy and objectives with our actual results. “Disclosure” is providing the information, but in our view, merely disclosing the information does not represent transparency. Transparency is a measure of the effort we apply to clearly communicate information in a way that the public can understand, without adding unnecessary complexity, or applying a confusing corporate filter.
Working in a small industry space – There are only a few major uranium mining companies in the world, and those miners that have a significant enough market share to be considered our peers and competitors are owned by sovereign interests. As a result of that government ownership, those competitors are not bound by the same transparency and public reporting requirements we are.
As the only large, publicly traded uranium miner, we provide a greater deal of voluntary disclosure about uranium mining and our company. Our challenge is to adhere to the regulatory rules that dictate when and how that information is disclosed, while carefully balancing our need to remain competitive in a very opaque market environment.
A complex, misunderstood industry – Our industry is complex, and public knowledge is low, even incorrect at times. Overcoming misconceptions and finding ways to communicate complex ideas in an easy-to-understand way is a significant challenge. It is important that we successfully meet this challenge since public support for our operations – what we call our “social licence to operate” – is so crucial to our business, as is maintaining support among investors.
Demand for more – Stakeholders are increasingly looking for more information in a timely fashion, whether it be financial, environmental or social. The number of indices, frameworks and rankings developed by investment firms and civil societies, particularly around sustainability issues, continues to expand, resulting in a large number of information requests. Our ability to fulfill these requests is limited by the time and resources we have available to commit to gathering and disseminating more information, as well as the need to retain competitively sensitive information.
Taking Action
We are committed to the following principles:
- providing disclosure in accordance with all legal and regulatory requirements
- embracing good disclosure practices for the dissemination of material information to the public, particularly with regards to accuracy, timeliness, clarity and balance in the company’s disclosure documents
- increasing stakeholder understanding of our business and preserving our reputation as a responsible corporate citizen by encouraging practices that reflect openness, accessibility and transparency
Financial reporting – this includes our required annual and quarterly reports, which contain detailed information on our financial performance, as well as updates on the material changes that have occurred at our operations and across the organization. These reports make up the primary channel for disclosure to our investors, and we are continually evaluating our reporting to ensure it is clear, accurate, and complies with all regulations.
Operational regulatory reporting – our industry is highly regulated, and we routinely report on our performance to numerous federal and provincial agencies. This includes regular reporting of the results of the safety, health and environmental monitoring programs at our facilities as well as event specific reports submitted in accordance with applicable acts, regulations and permits.
Sustainable Development report – this is our report card to our stakeholders, who help determine the necessary content and key material indicators. This report communicates how we’re performing against those indicators, which measure our social, environmental and economic impacts in the areas that matter most to these individuals and groups. We are deeply committed to sustainable development and reporting on our performance. As a result, we have been producing an SD report since 2005 using the Global Reporting Initiative’s Sustainability reporting framework, the widely accepted framework for mining companies throughout the world.
Website and social media – transparency isn’t just about providing information, it’s also about making it accessible. In addition to issuing press releases for broad dissemination, we use our websites and social media channels to achieve this goal. Our websites contain our reports, information and educational content about the business and the industry, as well as content relevant to communities local to our operations, such as key environmental and safety results. Our social media channels provide another point of access for stakeholders, as well as a way for them to engage with us.
