Material Sustainability Issues

Qatar Steel’s materiality assessment provides insights into the expectations and needs of its stakeholders. It enables us to identify and prioritize the most material sustainability issues through an exclusive and extensive stakeholder engagement process. As part of its sustainability management, Qatar Steel revises its material issues biennially, reviewing the changing industry context, emerging trends, and stakeholder feedback. In 2020, the materiality review and update was carried out in order to align the material issues with the new Corporate Strategy 2021-2025.

Materiality Assessment

The assessment followed the steps given below:

Step 1: Long list of possible material issues

Following on the methodology of the GRI Standards, the first step for conducting a materiality matrix for an
organization is through the identification of all the possible issues that will affect the organization and will impact
the decision of its stakeholders in relation to the social, environmental and economic issues (GRI 102-46). In this
step, a list of 28 sustainability issues was identified:

A list of 28 sustainability issues were identified, for more information please refer to the table given below.

Step 2: Level of materiality assessment

Senior management focal points of the various departments scored the importance of each issue to Qatar Steel
and to their business unit’s three most significant stakeholders (GRI 102-43, GRI 102-44). The results were analysed
to determine the most material issues for each stakeholder group, for all stakeholders collectively, and for Qatar
Steel.

Step 3: Development of a materiality matrix and top issues list

The average scores from Qatar Steel and all stakeholder groups combined were used to generate a materiality
matrix or ‘map’ plotting each issue on an X-Y axis where the X axis represents the significance of impacts to Qatar
Steel and the Y axis represents the significance to QS’s stakeholders (GRI 102-44). The resulting 2020 materiality
matrix for Qatar Steel is presented below representing the issues that are both of high significance for Qatar Steel
and highly influential on stakeholders’ assessments and decisions regarding Qatar Steel (GRI 102-47). The same
matrix is valid for 2021.