Enabling SME businesses to prosper in a low-carbon economy

The European Commercial Road Transport (CRT) industry is the backbone of all other manufacturing and retail industries. CRT refers to the movement of goods and passengers by road for commercial purposes (by truck, bus, taxi, and other vehicles that are used for business purposes). It includes business owners, drivers, dispatchers, and accountants with merchants in the fuel and alternative energy networks, toll and tax authorities, and other roadside and mobility service providers. It has an approximate turnover of €400 billion¹, which is central to all aspects of the European economy, generating 5% of GDP² and employing over 20 million people³. 

However, its reputation as a polluting industry does not play in its favour of popularity. It creates  more than 7%⁴ of the EU’s carbon emissions and suffers from global supply chain issues, changing consumer demands, and a growing regulatory burden.

Supporting a committed actor of the industry

Eurowag, founded in the Czech Republic in 1995 and listed on the London Stock Exchange since October 2021, provides smart solutions to optimise commercial road transport business. In line with its corporate purpose to help the CRT industry to become clean, fair, and efficient, Eurowag is developing products which increase efficiency by improving driver behaviour and route optimisation and calculating customers’ emissions in 23 countries through 12,000 fuel stations.

The company has set a combination of short-term and long-term decarbonisation targets, both for their own operations and their value chain. Its sustainability goals include reducing greenhouse gas emissions for Eurowag itself as a business and for its customers and increasing the representation of women in the organisation's senior leadership. 

Eurowag received multi-currency term and revolving financing from a syndicate of banks in September 2022. The company then agreed with Komerční banka (KB), Societe Generale group’s universal banking subsidiary in the Czech Republic, and other banks to link the financing to ESG criteria. These facilities were then restructured as a Sustainability-Linked Loan. As these facilities are now linked to the achievement of Eurowag’s sustainability goals, their interest rate pricing will be based on the performance of the agreed set of KPIs.

KB acted as ESG coordinator, verifying with Eurowag that the agreed KPIs are sufficiently ambitious, material, and verifiable from the perspective of other lenders. For KB, this also marks the first sustainability-linked loan which complies with international standards.

Societe Generale assisted KB in finetuning the level of targets, which was a complex task given the fact that Eurowag does not have direct control over customers and can influence their emissions only indirectly via their solutions.