The Solaron Story

Sonali and Vipul Arora started Solaron Sustainability Services in September 2007, the culmination of a long held dream to work in the space of sustainability. Solaron began with 15 team members in Bangalore, passionate about sustainability and eager to contribute to the space, and has now grown to a team of more than 65 like minded professionals across 15 emerging markets.

The Name Solaron

The inspiration behind the name Solaron is the Sun. Just as the Sun shines, bringing light to dark places on planet Earth, we aim to turn the light on onto hitherto dark areas in the ESG Space through our research and other sustainability related efforts.

The Solaron Difference

The subprime crisis has undone the developmental work of the last fifty years. The number of people at the base of the pyramid has increased by one billion since 2008. The root cause of this has been the irresponsible behaviour of some parts of the corporate sector and the inability of traditional financial & ESG research to act as a good watchdog. That is because traditional ESG research has largely been indicator based with the result that it has always been simplistic and out of context with some of the parameters almost akin to comparing apples to oranges. Accurate information is the foundation of markets. During and after these crises there were far too many surprises. Credit rating and ESG / financial research agencies failed the world during the time that they were most needed. We cannot turn back the clock but can prevent a similar disaster happening in the fast growing emerging markets. If the world is going to be a safe place, it is necessary to have functioning, sustainable emerging markets.

Emerging markets are different and need to have a different set of parameters than those currently used by developed markets. At Solaron, we have always questioned the status quo by identifying the hidden risks (that are usually missed by traditional ESG research) especially with companies in emerging markets where lack of transparency and inadequate disclosure is the norm.

The result has been ground-breaking work that our clients have witnessed not only with consulting and advisory services but also with standard ESG research thus reaffirming our belief that we are doing our bit to render the global economy a safer place while leapfrogging us into the next generation ESG arena.

Solaron is proud to have rated 3000 companies spread over sixteen countries till date.

The Road Ahead

Having thus changed the rules of ESG research for emerging markets, our mission now is to strive to be an institution that enables sustainability in emerging markets. Our corporate training, advisory & consulting services will be available from the third quarter of 2011.