We are proud to announce the release of the NIPSEA Group Sustainability Report 2025, detailing our environmental, social, and governance progress across 52 reporting units in 28 geographical locations.
As our Group CEO, Wee Siew Kim, shared in his foreword, “Sustainability is a discipline of asking better questions. Seven years of reporting has taught us that. The answers get sharper each time we look closer at our impact, our processes, our standards. FY2025 asked more of us than most years before it. We met that with rigour.”
This seventh consecutive report offers a comprehensive look at how we are closing out our current five-year ESG target while laying the groundwork for broader value-chain decarbonisation.
The Data Behind the Progress
Our performance this year reflects improvement across our operations, deeper supply-chain engagement, and a continued commitment to the people and communities we serve.
Environmental Stewardship & Climate Action
The path to Net Zero is rarely a straight line as it is a complex balancing act between meeting growing market demands and radically rethinking how we operate. As our production output increased this year, managing the environmental impacts associated with our growth remained an important operational challenge.
We are meeting this challenge directly on the factory floor by scaling up renewable energy, improving water efficiency and waste management, and mapping our value-chain emissions to ensure that our environmental responsibility scales alongside our business.
- Renewable Energy in Action: At Nippon Paint Singapore, a rooftop solar installation now generates approximately 1.65 million kWh annually, supplying around 50% of the site’s total electricity demand and avoiding 414 tonnes of CO₂e per year.
- Resource Efficiency: We successfully improved our water intensity by 10.8% compared to FY2024, bringing it down to 433.5 litres per tonne. Additionally, 41.6% of all generated waste was diverted towards recovery operations.
- First-Time Scope 3 Disclosure: For the first time, we have disclosed our Scope 3 emissions, marking a crucial step in gaining greater visibility into our value-chain footprint. This initial reporting currently covers the China Group, Betek Group, and selected Malaysia entities.
Sustainable Innovation
We believe the most profound environmental impacts are decided long before a product ever reaches the shelf as they are engineered in the laboratory. By integrating stringent health, safety, and environmental criteria early in the development cycle through our Green Design Review, we are designing solutions that do not just perform better, but actively protect the planet. This means embedding sustainability considerations into our product development process rather than treating them as a secondary feature.
- Commercial Impact: In FY2025, sustainably advantaged products accounted for 52.2% of our new product sales, generating US$ 951.13 million in revenue.
- R&D Pipeline: Empowered by our people across 56 R&D technical centres globally, we filed 197 new patent applications and secured 83 newly granted patents this year.
- Eliminating Harmful Substances: We are actively phasing out heavy metals and substances of concern across our products, with a commitment to eliminate lead, hexavalent chromium, cadmium, and mercury by 2030. As of the end of 2025, all newly developed products for the decorative segment sold via retail were formulated without added lead.
- Breakthrough Solutions: Key innovations include Nippon Paint China’s USDA-certified plant-based paint series, which increased its plant-based content from 26% to 51%, and the low-temperature fast-curing ACECRON 130 automotive coating, which reduces curing temperature from 160°C to 130°C and enables a 20% reduction in energy consumption.
People, Community, and Supply Chain
A resilient business is only as strong as the human connections that sustain it from the vendors who supply our raw materials to the neighbourhoods where our employees live and work.
We recognise that our success is inextricably linked to the well-being of these communities. By embedding rigorous ethical standards upstream and investing heavily in inclusive leadership and community empowerment downstream, we are ensuring that our growth creates a ripple effect of mutual prosperity.
- Community Impact: We invested over US$ 5.53 million across 80 CSR programmes globally, contributing 140,485 litres of paint and directly impacting the lives of 116,518 beneficiaries.
- Inclusive Workforce: We maintained our female representation in management and emerging leaders’ categories at 28.4%. We are also scaling our Women Mentoring Programme to local markets to build a stronger pipeline of future leaders.
- Safety First: Guided by our “Dare to Care, Care to Know, Know to Prevent” mindset, we recorded a Recordable Case Rate (RCR) of 0.17, well below our target of 1.0. We continue to strengthen workplace safety practices, including implementing corrective and preventive measures in response to identified risks and incidents.
- Responsible Sourcing: To strengthen supply chain resilience and reduce logistics-related emissions, 70% of our total purchases were sourced in-country. Furthermore, 87% of all new suppliers were screened against ESG risks during onboarding.
As we prepare to establish our next set of five-year ESG targets, we remain focused on measurable, continuous improvement. As Mr. Wee noted, “Progress rarely moves in a straight line. FY2025 reminded us of that more than once. But I’m confident that our habit of asking the harder question is what will carry us forward.”
