It starts with a vision. For Ericsson, this is about harnessing the power of technology to change lives. It means telling a story, using our voice to take a leadership role and listen to and engage in dialogue with others, to hear their stories. And it’s about value, how our commitment to sustainability creates enduring value. That is why this report is called Vision, Voice and Value.

Part of our long-standing commitment to sustainability is to respond to challenges as they evolve over time.

Climate change is among these key challenges. Ericsson has a vision to use telecommunications to foster a more carbon-lean society. As global climate negotiations resume in 2009, society faces a huge challenge to drastically reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 2050, while the world economy as much as triples.

In 2008, we set a target to reduce our carbon footprint by 40 percent over the next five years. To meet this target, we have introduced solutions and services to optimize network energy efficiency and help our customers achieve energy and CO2 savings. Many of our customers are concerned about energy-related operating costs. We have also started to roll-out telepresence solutions within our company that will not only cut carbon, but save both time and money.

Ericsson is taking an active leadership role in shaping the market for fresh solutions, not only by substituting carbon-intensive travel, but also cross-sectoral initiatives like smart utility grids and other digital solutions. We promote the adoption of a common industry framework for measuring CO2 savings through the use of telecom and intend to share our vision with decision-makers in the run-up to upcoming climate negotiations.

Ericsson’s vision is to make communication affordable and accessible to all. Telecommunications can boost social and economic development and help close the digital divide. In May 2008, I gave my support to UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Business Call to Action. This pledge commits us to leverage our core business to enhance growth in a transformative and scalable manner to help meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). As a follow-up, in September I addressed a UN General Assembly special session on how the private sector can contribute to achieving the MDGs and what Ericsson is doing to this end.

In partnership with Columbia University’s Earth Institute, Ericsson is bringing mobile communications to the Millennium Villages as part of our engagement to help achieve the MDGs. It is inspiring to visit these isolated African villages and observe first-hand the impact mobile phones and Internet access have on education, healthcare, and business. I believe our experience in these villages is truly scalable, with the promise of transforming the lives of millions, even billions, of people.

The Millennium Villages are just one example of how public-private partnerships enhance our understanding of how to deliver our services in more sustainable ways, and help build trust in our commitment among stakeholders.

There are already some four billion mobile subscriptions in the world today. For Ericsson, markets of the future are high-growth economies such as China, India, Brazil and Africa. The next one or two billion will come from these economies, as more people enjoy the benefits communication can bring to their lives and societies.

If we continue to shape sustainable business models to roll-out solutions to the billions on the other side of the digital divide, this technology will be truly transformational.

Telecommunications are also intrinsic to the fulfillment of basic human rights, like the right to health, to education, to a livelihood and to freedom of expression. As a member of the Business Leaders Initiative on Human Rights, Ericsson strongly supports the relationship between human rights and business and encourages all companies to report on the relevance of human rights in their sustainability reports. First and foremost, our role is to avoid complicity in human rights abuses. We also engage with those most socially and economically marginalized to improve their access to human rights. Equally important is supporting human rights such as health, education and livelihood, by enabling access to basic services through mobile connectivity.

Our commitment to the UN Global Compact and human rights includes reinforcing them along the supply chain. We became aware that some of our suppliers in Bangladesh were not meeting our high social and environmental standards. This experience served to sharpen top management focus on this issue, and strengthened our approach to monitoring and engaging our supply chain in improvements. We have increased our efforts to ensure our Code of Conduct program will be rolled out globally in 2009, and this is now one of the criteria for evaluation in Top Management Scorecards for all Market Units.

Five years from now, I would like to see that we have achieved our carbon reduction target, helped play a part in transforming cities and countries through smarter broadband solutions, and made substantial progress in bridging the digital divide.

The current global financial crisis has not changed our way of doing business. At the end of the day, sustainability is about doing things better and more efficiently, which seldom means more costs. It is about having a global view, and a diverse workforce that fosters innovation. A commitment to sustainability helps build trust with our customers, investors and other stakeholders, even in tougher times. We also know that this topic is important to our employees and are actively seeking new ways to engage them further.

Through technology, Ericsson has both the opportunity and the responsibility to work toward a more sustainable society. And in the long run, I am firmly convinced this commitment will generate lasting value.