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Integrated Annual Report

Sustainability / ESG Performance

Corporate governance

Corporate governance

Our commitment to Board diversity is a cornerstone of our governance strategy. By setting clear targets, monitoring progress, and continually striving to enhance diversity, we aim to build a more effective and representative leadership team.

BS&D

Board structure and diversity

E&AC

Ethics and anti-corruption

C

Compliance

Board structure and diversity

Performance and focus areas for 2025

Our commitment to ethnic and racial diversity involves actively seeking diverse candidates and ensuring that our Board represents a diverse range of backgrounds. This diversity enhances our ability to understand and effectively respond to the needs of our customer base.

Our Legal Department ensures compliance with relevant legislation, regulations and anticipated regulatory changes. We have a Legal and Regulatory Compliance Framework that maps legislation across each of our business units.

Read more about our compliance focus areas for 2025 here.
SDG target KPIs Performance in 2025 KPIs for 2026

5A
Undertake reforms to give women equal rights to economic resources, as well as access to ownership and control over land and other forms of property, financial services, inheritance and natural resources, in accordance with national laws 		Have a female representation of 40% or more at the Board Level
Not Achieved
Our female representation at year-end was 33.33%. 		40%

Looking forward to 2026

In 2026, we seek to improve our female representation on the Board.

Ethics and anti-corruption

" Famous Brands strives to adhere to good governance principles and practices, fostering a culture of transparency, integrity, and ethical decision-making. "

We aspire to be a trustworthy organisation in every market and community where we operate. We consider the effects of our decisions and actions, and avoid causing harm to the economy, society, and the environment

We aim to achieve the following:

 
An understanding of our core beliefs
  • Ensuring that our seven core beliefs are entrenched in every market and community where we operate.
    Read more here.
Ethics commitment and accountability
  • Ensuring that employees understand and internalise the ethics message and vision of Famous Brands and recognise the importance of ethics in the Group’s operations.
  • Ensuring that management buys into the ethics vision; are visibly committed to ethics, support employees in making better ethical decisions, enforce policies, rules, and procedures, and visibly model ethical behaviour.
  • Ensuring that Famous Brands and its management hold employees fairly and consistently accountable for their behaviour and decision-making in an open and transparent manner.
Ethics awareness
  • Ensuring that employees are exposed to the values, convictions, and Code of Ethics and conduct through formal and informal training interventions, and that they are sensitised to ethics and ethical conduct.
  • Ensuring that Famous Brands and its employees can openly discuss ethics without fear of reprisal, feel safe to raise ethical concerns, and are encouraged to speak openly about right and wrong within the organisation by leadership at every level.
Ethical treatment of employees
  • Ensuring that management treat employees with respect, fairness and dignity.
  • Ensuring that decisions or actions that may affect employees are tested for their ethical impact with the purpose of creating beneficence.

Performance and focus areas for 2025

Famous Brands has a Code of Ethics that is reviewed each year. Employees are required to comply with the Code of Ethics. The following policies and practices are in place to foster an ethical culture:

  • A Gift and Hospitality Policy.
  • A Whistle-blowing Policy.
  • Conflict of Interest Declaration Policy.
  • Anti-occupational Fraud policy.
  • Supplier Code of Ethics.
  • Training and awareness.
  • Due diligence processes.
  • Effective reporting.

Famous Brands has an Ethics Management Programme facilitated by The Ethics Institute. The programme aims to foster ethical conduct, due care and compliance with our Code of Ethics. In 2025, 82 employees participated in this programme (2024: 43). Additionally, 92 and 182 employees received e-learning training on workplace ethics and whistleblower induction, respectively. Our ongoing ethics focus areas include:

  • Measures to entrench Famous Brands’ core beliefs.
  • Measures to improve ethics commitment and accountability.
  • Increased focus on the topic of ethics, including channels for employees to ask questions.
  • Ethics awareness training for new and existing employees.
  • Improving the fairness and perceived fairness of certain people practices.

In 2025, our ethics priorities aligned with our ethics programme. These included:

  • Further entrenching the Famous Brands’ core beliefs conversations.
  • Implementing ethics management campaigns, including in the Company-owned stores in Mauritius.
  • Reviewing and redistributing the Code of Ethics.
  • Embedding the Supplier Code of Ethics.
  • Ongoing ethics awareness and training for all levels, including management.
  • Reinforcing conflict of interest disclosures.

Famous Brands provides all employees with training on ethical behaviour and major workplace issues. Training modules include:

  • Meeting etiquette.
  • Workplace ethics.
  • Workplace professionalism.
  • Dealing with bullying.
  • Sexual harassment.
  • Risk management.
  • POPIA and Data Privacy.
  • The Labour Relations Act.
  • The Basic Conditions of Employment Act.
  • Occupational health and safety.

Famous Brands has an anonymous ethics hotline in South Africa and selected African markets (Botswana, Kenya and Mauritius). In 2025, we received five disclosures, two concept queries and 348 dropped or no response calls. All disclosures were investigated and closed appropriately.

Looking forward to 2026

In, 2026 we will continue to embed all the initiatives implemented in 2025.

Compliance

Read more about our compliance practices in our corporate governance here.
Social Responsibility
Human Capital Review