Sidenor 2021 Sustainability Report. Non-financial information statement

42 Sustainability Report 2021 | Good governance, ethics and transparency Within the framework of Sidenor’s Risk Control and Management Policy, the Company Management regularly updates the risk map of the organisation and performs a constant monitoring in order to promptly detect risks to the business and act fast so as to minimise their impact. In 2020, the COVID-19 crisis resulted in an unprecedented business scenario and revealed various types of risks, some of which persisted in 2021, such as the increased difficulty in protecting our employees’ health, which led us to maintain the COVID-19 protocol of action, as explained before. Besides, two situations occurred in the last months of 2021, which had a big impact on our business: (i) a continuous increase in gas and power prices that reached all-time highs in the European markets, which implies a significant increase in our production costs; and (ii) an issue in the supply chain, mainly provoked by the imbalance between offer and demand resulting from the pandemic and logistics problems at world level. This shortage of raw materials for production in markets such as the European one leads, in turn, to a price increase of these raw materials. In front of such a situation, Sidenor works to search for alternatives and adopt measures which might enable the Company to minimise or avoid the impact of such risks in business until the situation normalises. Without limiting the foregoing, the Company Management has identified the main risks, associated with internal or external factors, to which the organisation is exposed, and has a Risk Control and Management Policy which establishes a general framework for action, in order to reasonably ensure that all risks identified (Operations and Infrastructure, Strategy and Planning, Governance) are prevented, evaluated, submitted to continuous follow-up, and reduced to the assumption and tolerance levels defined by the Management. The main non-financial risks identified at Sidenor are the following: Risk management