Suppliers

Sourcing & procurement are strategic levers for our business performance: we spend annually around €10Bn, i.e 60% of our turnover, to run our operations in over 60 countries. To reach world-class excellence, while respecting fundamental principles on health & safety, ethics and sustainability, Lafarge partners with the best suppliers in terms of cost reduction, innovation, efficiency and quality.

 

Find out about our suppliers

 

Our sourcing & procurement approach

Being a Lafarge supplier is not only about providing goods and services. It means being a partner and contributor to our business and operations: we expect Lafarge suppliers to bring the best of their innovation capacity and operational excellence, to contribute to our cost reduction programs and develop new products, which provide us with a competitive edge.

For this collaboration to deliver its full results, we need to rely on suppliers sharing the same approach on our core values:

  • Ethics & Code of business conduct: Our expectations towards our suppliers and our employees are the same worldwide: reading and complying with the Lafarge Code of Business Conduct is an absolute condition to work with Lafarge. All suppliers must observe the highest standards of professional conduct when interacting and dealing with Lafarge employees.
  • Health & safety and sustainability: We believe that no one should lose his life or get injured at work. This is why we took strong health & safety commitments with our Sustainability Ambitions 2020. We expect our suppliers to embrace and share our vision on health & safety, which ranks as our number one priority. 
    Therefore, becoming a Lafarge supplier requires applying very high health & safety standards, which have been listed in our Lafarge Supplier Safety and Sustainability brochure.
 

How we work with our suppliers

We carefully assess and select our suppliers based on their commitment to health & safety and sustainability, and also on the lowest total cost of ownership, their capacities to offer innovative solutions and their overall performance including quality and transactional efficiency.

Our organization

Our sourcing organization is split into a central team and country sourcing & procurement teams, in order to leverage on our spend and maximize economies of scale.

What we purchase

  • Energy (fossil fuels, recycled products and power)
  • Raw materials
  • Industrial products & consumables
  • Industrial services
  • Transport services
  • General supplies & services
  • Plants & equipments
  • Products for resale
 

More details of what Lafarge purchases (pdf, 8.15 KB)

 

Sustainable sourcing & procurement

We want to work with suppliers sharing our sustainability program and practices. As part of our Sustainability Ambitions 2020, we committed to having 100% of purchases from suppliers who have agreed to respect communities and workers' human rights (UN Global Compact and OECD guidelines for Human Rights for Multi-national Enterprises).

For this purpose, we implement a series of actions:

  • We include our expectations in sustainability in all our contracts.
  • We evaluate our suppliers on their environment, labor, human rights, ethics and sustainable purchasing practices. The evaluation is carried out by ECOVADIS, a company specialized in supplier assessments. Our target is to assess a minimum of 80% of spend and, where necessary, we will work with suppliers on remediation plans.
 
Download Lafarge 2014 Annual Report

Download Lafarge 2014 Annual Report

2014 Lafarge Annual Report (pdf, 5.5 MB)