MAS Holdings

Go Beyond - Empowering Women to go beyond in the Apparel industry

Tuesday 20 January 2009

1 inspired

* In 2003 November MAS launched a stratgeic Social sustainability intitiative to empower its predominantly female workforce (92%) in terms of providing an enabling environment to advance in there careers, Work Life balance and to Reward excellence.

* The Global outsourced apparel industry has been always perceived as running ’Sweatshop’ manufacturing facilities that exploit women worldwide.

* MAS since its launch in 1987 has always believed in doing the ’Right thing’ by its employees and set the apparel industry standard in Sri Lanka for empowering women.

* Since 2005 when MAS won the American Apparel and Footwear Associations -(AAFA) award for Excellence in Corporate Socail responsinility, its work has been documented and validated by two case studies developed by the INSEAD business school in May 2006 titled ’Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility in the apparel industry’ and in March 2008 titled ’Leveraging Corporate responsibility. In 2007 The UNITED NATIONS GLOBAL COMACT AND THE UN HUMAN RIGHTS OFFICE OF THE COMMISSIONER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS published its 2007 report ’Embedding Human rights in Business practice 11’ which featured the Go Beyond program as a benchmark case study on POLICY.

* The future challenges will revolve around competing globally in a market place which is increasingly ’low cost driven’ but yet demanding Sustainable business solutions.

* MAS has once again pioneered Sustainable business solutions having establshed its self in Social sustainability to moving toward Environemntal sustainability by launching both a ’Green fabric park and a Green manufacturing plant’ in 2008 to meet the futue challenges.

Location: Sri Lanka

Sector: apparel manufacture

Official website: http://www.masholdings.com

Key figures:

MAS Holdings: Embedding Human rights in Business practice

*MAS is a privately held Multi-national engaged in develivering
’Sustainable and Innovative apparel solutions’ headquartered in Sri Lanka

* MAS was launched in 1987 and in the past 20years has grown to be a US $ 700m business, employing over 40,000 in 5 countries world wide - Sri Lanka, India, Mexico, Indonesia and China

* It is a lead strategic vendor to Victoria Secret (US) and Nike (US)

Nbr. visits: 1745

Nbr. inspires: 1