It appears that the process towards mandatory Integrated Reporting is inevitable. The businesses need to be prepared to take the first steps towards applying these new reporting principles to remain successful over long term. At the same time many practitioners raise many justified questions, as there is no established Integarted Reporting framework, guidelines or thorough business practice yet available. This Master Thesis examines the developments of Integrated Reporting theory and provides practical insights, based on a survey conducted among South-African listed entities, into how businesses perceive the new reporting concept. The focus of this thesis was to investigate, whether the current theoretical frameworks provide sufficient guidance on Integrated Reporting adoption, whether companies perceive value creation from applying Integrated Reporting principles, what were the main challenges and opportunities faced, and whether the Integrated Reporting should remain voluntary or become a mandatory requirement. In addition a critical analysis of the Integrated Reporting Discussion Paper published in September 2011 is provided.
Table of Contents
i. List of Figures
ii. List of Tables
iii. List of Abbreviations
1. INTRODUCTION
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1. Recent Developments in Financial and Non-Financial Reporting
2.2. Recent Developments in Integrated Reporting
2.2.1. Integrated Reporting definition and evolution
2.2.2. Integrated Reporting Framework
2.2.3. Integrated Reporting Benefits and Challenges
2.2.4. Conducted research and relevant findings
3. METHODOLOGY
3.1 Survey design
3.2 Limitations
4. SURVEY RESULTS AND FINDINGS
4.1 Insights from Integrated Reporting practice in South Africa
4.2 Integrated Reporting Framework applicability
4.3 Integrated Reporting: Benefits vs. Challenges
4.4 Integrated Reporting: voluntary vs. mandatory approach
5. CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF INTEGRATED REPORTING DISCUSSION PAPER
6. CONCLUSION
LIST OF REFERENCES
APPENDIX
i.List of Figures
Figure 1: Components of S&P 500 Market Value. Source: Ocean Tomo,
Figure 2: Global reporting output per year (Corporate Register 2011: 5)
Figure 3: GRI Reports from 2000 to 2010 (GRI 2011b: 2)
Figure 4: Assets under management by SRI funds in Europe during 2002-2009. (Ibid: 11)
Figure 5: The anticipated evolution of the corporate reporting. (IIRC 2011: 7)
Figure 6: Published Integrated Reports per year and per region. (Corporate Register: 5)
Figure 7: Novo Nordisk share performance comparison with competitors during 2005-2011
Figure 8: The IRF five Guiding Principles and six Content Elements (IIRC 2011, 8)
Figure 9: Business Model and the Value Creation (IIRC 2011: 10))
Figure 10: The status of IR for the top 40 and SRI companies in December 2010. (Ibid: 22)
Figure 11: Investor Interest in Social and Environmental Information and the degree of integration by the companies.(Eccles, Serafeim 2011: 88-89)
Figure 12: Should European policy promote the concept of "IR"? (Ibid: 14-15)
Figure13: Scoring model ranking principles for questions 18 and 19. PbA
Figure14: Scoring model ranking principles for questions 20 and 21. PbA
Figure 15: Companies categorised by their financial year end in %.PbA
Figure 16: Survey responses received by industry and by position. PbA
Figure 17: Length of South African IRs published during 2011 (as of 01.11.2011). PbA
Figure18: The main value adding factors - scoring result for the question 18. PbA
Figure19: The main value destructing factors - scoring result for the question 19. PbA
Figure20: Challenges ranked according to their significance. PbA
Figure21: Opportunities/benefits ranked according to their significance. PbA
Figure 22: Proposed IR Phased Approach.PbA
ii.List of Tables
Table 1: Integrated and traditional corporate reporting comparison. (IIRC 2011, 9)
iii.List of Abbreviations
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1. INTRODUCTION
“There is no business to be on a dead planet.” David Brower
The business worldwill be going through fundamental changes as the world is standing in a verge of economical, environmental and socialcollapse without immediate interference. The concentration on short term financial performance over a holistic long-term sustainability view poses systematic risk to society and business in general as it leads to „profit above all” management decisions.
Resulting consequences from „short-termism” includingclimate change, depletion of finite natural resources, ecosystem degradation and human rights violations among others are becoming more evident than ever. The ability to cope with these severe global challenges is of strategic importance in achieving sustainable long-term success for every organisation. Porter and Kramer (2006: 83) put it: „ Successful corporations need a healthy society and a healthy society needs successful companies”. Nevertheless, without adequate measurement and reporting tools, better decisions and actions are difficult to take.
There is strong evidence that the current challenges cannot be overcome with 20th century reporting tools. The recent developments have raised justified questions whether the current business reporting is covering all significant risks, indicating the true cost of conducting business and being transparent enough in explaining how the bottom lineresult is achieved.
Current separate financial and sustainability reporting systems do not highlight relevant cause-effect relationships between financial and non-financial performance. The link, how business operations and sustainability objectives are connected to each other (along with supporting KPIs) is missing. With increasing pressure from various stakeholder groups, a new innovative way –IntegratedReporting (IR) - emerged to communicate strategy, performance and accountability better,along with improved transparency.
IRis a rapidly evolving new corporate reporting tool, developed by the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) that in essence combines the conventional annual report and the sustainability report into one coherent document and demonstrates the interconnectivity between material financial and non-financial (environmental, social, governance) information. The IR demonstrates„ in a clear and concise manner the organisation’s stewardship...and ability to create and sustain value in the short, medium and longer term”. (IIRC 2011: 6)Organisations are required to embed sustainability strategy and operations into their core business model because the integrated external reporting without an integrated management would be impossible (Eccles&Krzuz, 2010: 4). IR will make apparent the extent to which performance for shareholders imposes externalities to other stakeholders (Ibid: 23) and challenges management to be much more precise about how they are „ doing well (shareholders) by doing good (for stakeholders)” (Ibid: 150).
Immense attention and support from businesses, academics, investors, standard setters, regulators and from NGOs in recent years has made the topic very actual and relevant. Several companies have started experimenting with IR, standards and frameworks are being developed (IRDiscussion Paper published by IIRC on 12.09.2011), academics around the world are publishing relevant articles, assurance and consultation industry is issuing „how to” guides and regulators are actively seeking ways to mandatethe new requirements.
The sustainability reporting has been developed over the last two decades and remained largely voluntary in most countries. Similarly, many companies worldwide have started adopting the IR principles voluntarily as a logical response to the changes in internal strategy and perceived this to be an additional source of competitive advantage. Besides, stakeholders can clearly separate IR practitioners from other organisations and praise them for additional transparency. An exceptional case comes from South Africa, where the mandatory IR requirement became effective on March 2011.
South Africa was the first country where the IR was made mandatory on a “comply-or-explain” basisto all entities listed on Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) commencing with the year end on or after March 2011 (King Kode of Governance III: SAICA 2010). Other examples include the Grenelle II Act in France that requires all companies, both public and private, with 500 or more employees, to disclose non-financial information (assured by a third party) in their annual reports starting from 2012 (Eccles and Armbrester, 2011: 14).Based on an EU survey about non-financial reporting, the majority of respondents expressed support for IR by indicating that it should be mandatedat EU level (Public Consult. 2011: 2). Important contributions towards new legislations can be expected from Earth Summit being hosted in Rio de Janeiro in 2012, which could be lead to mandatory IR worldwide in the near future.
It appears that the process towards mandatory IR is inevitable. In order to remain successful, businesses have to be prepared to take the first steps towards applying these new principles. At the same time the, IR approach raises many justified questions to practitioners, as there is no established framework, guidelines or thorough business practice yet.
This has motivated the author to provide a comprehensive view on current theoretical and empirical standing of the concept, and to critically analyse the proposed IR Discussion Paper (IR DP) based on the knowledge gained throughout the writing of this thesis.Moreover, to investigate the business views and attitudes towards IR,an online survey was designed to examine the following research questions:
RQ1: Are the current theoretical frameworks providing sufficient guidance for IR adoption? Are any substantial changes required?
RQ2: To what extent do companies perceive the incremental value creation from applying the IR principles? What are the principal sources of value creators and destructors? What are the main challenges and opportunities faced during the implementation period?
RQ3: Should the companies adopt the IR voluntarily as a response to market pressure (stakeholders) or should it be a compulsory requirement initiated by the governments?
A qualitative approach is applied to the theoretical part of the thesis in order to give a critical view on IR developments with emphasis on IR DP. For the empirical sectiona quantitative approach is used by conducting an online survey among South African listed entities.
The literature review focuses on sustainability and IR theory and developments: 1) the flaws in current sustainability reporting systems and business behaviour are discussed; 2) the reasons, why the time for IR has come, are pointed out; 3) the conceptual framework of IR is described; and 4) the potential benefits and challenges are highlighted. The literature review ends with an overview of conducted research and their relevant findings. The results and findings section providesanalysis and discussion to proposed research questions based on the survey results. The final paragraph includes a critical analysisof the current IIRC DP.
The master thesis contributes to IR research in several ways. First of all, it gives additional perspectives to IR theory. Secondly, the findings from online survey complement the empirical evidence in this field, and thirdly it provides companies and legislators with practical insights about the necessity, usefulness and application of the IR model.
The research presented here would not have been possible without South African companies who took the time to complete the survey that formed the basis for the empirical research. Furthermore, I would like to thank Margit Vaaks and Prof.Dr.AvoSchönbohm for the advice, support and encouragementgiven.
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1. Recent Developments in Financial and Non-Financial Reporting
Over the last decades the world has gone through substantial changes as a result of vast technological progression, innovation, globalization, growing population and enormous consumption. Businesses need to face and respond to growing social and environmental concerns. In order to keep pace with changes in market conditions, the reporting must progress as well. The financial reporting framework was once designed for meeting the needs of the industrial world. The emphasis was and continues to be on the stewardship of the financial capital and value creation through business operations (IIRC 2011: 5).
The financial reporting has evolved over a long time and has been considered as a primary communication tool in interaction with shareholders, analysts and other stakeholders. In order to provide decision-useful information to investors and other users the financial information needs to be relevant, reliable, understandable and comparable (IASB 2011). The world is apparently moving towards adopting principles based on International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) that are complemented by national laws, regulations and stock exchange listing requirements (IIRC 2011: 5).
The need for a more comprehensive set of information is clearly supported by the change in tangible and intangible asset structure in a modern organization. Figure 1 below indicates that the average market value of a Standard &Poor’s 500 company in 1975 consisted only of 17% intangible assets whereas it has grown up to 80% by 2010. (Ocean Tomo, 2011)
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Figure 1: Components of S&P 500 Market Value. Source: Ocean Tomo, 2011
In order to keep up with the changing business environment, new disclosure requirements have been added over time. This has led to an increase in the information provided through longer and more complex financial reports and management commentaries, increased reporting on governance and remuneration matters and separate sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reporting (IIRC 2011: 5). As a result, the annual reports are becoming excessively long and complex which makes them difficult to prepare, understand, analyze and make decisions upon.
Apart from coping with complexities, businesses are also evidencing a paradigm shift in corporate management, moving from shareholder value creation to broader stakeholder view. The latter comprises of four recent major developments (Waldkirch 2008: 4): Stakeholder Value Creation, Triple Bottom Line, CSR and Sustainability Reporting. Most of these developments are related to the need for more transparency and communication about corporate environmental and social impacts on society. During the late 1980’s the Brundtland Commission defined the Sustainable Development as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations meeting their own needs” (Our common future: 1987).
The essence of Triple Bottom Line(Elkington 1997) is that organizations should expand their traditional financial reporting framework by measuring economical, ecological and social performance. This initiateda vast sustainability movement that can be seen from increased number of sustainability and CSR reports ever since, as pointed out inFigure 2 below:
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Figure 2: Global reporting output per year (Corporate Register 2011: 5)
The chart demonstrates clearly that the majority of non-financial information today is communicated through two reporting types: CSR and sustainability reporting. The CSR reporting has the emphasis on social matters such as ethical labour practices, training, education and diversity of work force and corporate philanthropic initiatives, whereas the sustainability reporting covers economic, environmental and social performance (AICPA 2011).
PwC has pointed out that the companies are no more “pushing” the information out into the market, but it is “pulled” by the different stakeholders. Moreover “new technological developments, more collaborative business models and greater stakeholder awareness mean that there is much more open access to information. Blogs, twitters and the new media environment in general have turned the brick walls of our offices into glass”. (PwC 2010: 20)
As IFRS does not include non-financial information reporting standards, many companies have started disclosing non-financial information by using other guidelines. The most widely used non-financial information reporting framework worldwide, known as the Sustainability Reporting Guidelines (latest version G3.1, published in March 2011), is developed by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) (incorporated in 1997).The GRI Guidelines are applicable to organizations regardless of their size,sectoror geographic region. According to the GRI, the Guidelinesfeature “performance indicators and management disclosures whichorganisations can adopt voluntarily, flexibly and incrementally, enabling them to be transparent about their performance in key sustainability areas”. (GRI2011a)
The statistics published by GRI (see Figure 3) illustrates a vast growth in sustainability reporting, rising from a mere 50 reports in 2000 to 1’860 in 2010.(GRI 2011b: 2)
illustration not visible in this excerpt
Figure 3: GRI Reports from 2000 to 2010 (GRI2011b: 2)
The incentives for more sustainability and CSR reporting are evident (AICPA 2011): 1) to demonstrate organisations’ accountability on environmental and social issues to employees and communities, 2) to improve transparency and meet the information needs of broader stakeholder group, 3) to manage risk better, 4) to enhance and protect reputation and 5) toincreasebrand and shareholder value. Clearly, the non-financial reporting is perceived by many firms as an additional competitive advantage that can give an edge in long-term value creation and even survival. The CSR Reporting has grown steadily since 1992 and reached to an output of 5000 published reports by the end of 2010(Corporate Register 2011: 4).
The launch of a sustainable stock exchanges initiative by the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment has been another significant development towards mainstreaming non-financial information reporting. Its objective is toexamine how stock exchanges, investors, regulators, and companies can collaborate to improve the transparency and disclosure of ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) performance, and promotea long‐term approachin investing.Emerging markets’stock exchanges, including Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and South Africa, are leading the way in enhancing the sustainability reporting by launching various ESG disclosure rules in recent years. (Eccles, Krzus, Serafeim 2011: 4).
Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) funds have played a very important role for making non-financial information relevant for investors, analysts and businesses. Lately there has been an immense growth in invested capital in such funds where capital allocation decisions are based on CSR and sustainability performance.The emerging interest in SRI investing also creates demand for analysts that understand sustainability strategies.And evidently businesses are interested in maintaining attention from investors.By the end of 2009,the assets under management by SRI funds in Europe reached €5 trillion (see Figure4) and worldwide €7.6 trillion (EUROSIF 2010: 59).
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Figure4: Assets under management by SRI funds in Europe during 2002-2009. (Ibid: 11)
Bloomberg has started offering investors access to non-financial information in their terminals. Eccles, Krzus, Serafeim (2011: 1) conducted a research based on the usage of ESG information in Bloomberg and found that interest for greater transparency around ESG performance and policies has risen, and it can be used as a proxy for assessing management quality and their potential to be profitable in the long-term. Nevertheless only about 21% of listed companies report any sustainability information based on Bloomberg’s research (IIRC 2011: 4).
Ioannou and Serafeim (2010: 27) investigated the impact of CSR strategies on analysts’ recommendations and concluded that socially responsible companies got more positive recommendations in recent years compared to earlier ones, thus indicating a changed perception by the analysts towards value creation of such strategies. Cheng, Ioannou, and Serafeim (2011: 22) demonstrate that excellent performance on CSR strategies provide an opportunity for long-term value creation by ensuring better access to finance and thus enabling realisation of strategic investment decisions.
Regardless of the positive recommendations by analysts and increased assets under management in SRI funds, the majority of investors are still not using the ESG data in their investment decisions. There are several constraints to overcome in order to make the inclusion of ESG metrics into mainstream capital allocation decisions more popular. The investors and organisations are facing a so called „chicken and egg” problem (Accelerating...2010: 7): more investors will consider ESG information only when more companies provide it, and more companies will provide ESG information only when more investors demand it. Additional obstacles are arising from restrictions in conventional valuation models, lack of ESG expertise, investors’mindsets, insufficient ESG integration into core business strategies, problems in defining materiality, weak link between financial and non-financial information and focus on short-term performance (Ibid: 6-7).
The verification of sustainability data by third parties plays a crucial role in increasing the credibility and reliability of sustainability reports. Currently no internationally accepted auditing principles for sustainability reporting exist, but some guidelines have been published including the AA1000 Assurance Standard (2008). This standard stands for improving the credibility and quality of sustainability data and provides a comprehensive way of holding an “organization to account for its management, performance and reporting on sustainability issues by evaluating the adherence of an organisation to the AccountAbility Principles and the reliability of associated performance information” (AA1000SA: 2008).
It has been argued whether the sustainability reporting should remain voluntary or become a mandatory requirement. Ioannou and Serafeim (2011: 29) have conducted a research where they conclude that a mandatory disclosure has several positive impacts. In particular it enhances transparency and can change corporate behaviour and the way business is conducted. They argue that a mandatory ESG information disclosure forces companies to handle these matters more effectively in order to avoid disclosing poor ESG performance.
The vast growth in sustainability information disclosure has raised justified questions whether organisations use it as a medium for achieving better corporate accountability (Ramanna 2011: 6) or just for green-washing purposes. Marquis and Toffel (2011: 5) indicate the existence of selective disclosure, called symbolic compliance or green-washing, whereby companies overemphasize the positive aspects of ESG performance in order to conceal their true environmental impact. The users of non-financial information should therefore be cautious when assessing the environmental performance and making resource allocation decisions.
The financial and non-financial reporting has developed into two sets of disconnected reports, making it harder to evaluate the performance now and in the future. Information that really matters should be reported, instead of just complying with legal requirements. The pressure of adding more information is evident and thus the reports have become very long and filled with clutter. The interdependencies between strategy and risk, financial and non-financial performance, governance and performance, the organisation’s own performance and its value chain must be pointed out (IIRC 2011: 5). For those reasons a new Integrated Reporting model has been developed to conform to the 21st century challenges and meet the needs of a broad set of stakeholders simultaneously.
2.2. Recent Developments in Integrated Reporting
2.2.1. Integrated Reporting definition and evolution
Integrated Reporting (IR) is a very new movement in the Corporate Reporting field, and no internationally recognised definition is yet established. In general terms,IR stands for integratingthe most materialfinancial and non-financial informationinto a single interconnectedreport that substitutes the current separate annual and sustainability report.(IIRC 2011: 6).
The IR Committee ofSouth Africa (IRC SA) published the first IR Discussion Paper in January 2011 to provide principles-based guidelines for local listed companies who were mandated by the King Code of Governance Principles for South Africa 2009 (King III) to provide Annual Report ending on or later than 01.03.2011 as an Integrated Report. The IR was defined as„ a report to stakeholders on the strategy, performance, and activities of the organisation in a manner that allows stakeholders to assess the ability of the organisation to create and sustain value over the short, medium and long-term.” (IRC SA 2011a: 6-7)
The IR concept was developed further by the IIRC that was established by the Prince of Wales’ Accounting for Sustainability Project and the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) in 2010 with a mission to create aninternationally accepted Integrated Reporting Framework (IRF).The framework is developed in order to help organisationsin taking more sustainable actions and decisions and furthermore to provide investors and other stakeholders’ a better basis for assessing the actual performance of an organisation.The IIRC represents a collaboration of cross sectional leaders from the corporate, investment, regulatory, accounting, academic, and standard-setting sectors, as well as from civil society. In September 2011 an improved IR Discussion Paper was published that defined IR accordingly (IIRC 2011: 8):
„ IR brings together the material information about an organization’s strategy, governance, performance and prospects in a way that reflects the commercial, social and environmental context within which it operates. It provides a clear and concise representation of how an organization demonstrates stewardship and how it creates value, now and in the future.IR combines the most material elements of information currently reported in separate reporting strands (financial, management commentary, governance and remuneration, and sustainability) in a coherent whole, and importantly - shows the connectivity between themand explains how they affect the ability of an organization to create and sustain value in the short, medium and long-term.”
According to the King III Report‘s and IIRC chairman Mervyn King: „ It‘s important to note that IR is not replacing financial reporting, rather it reflects the evolution of reporting and the company‘s role in society. It is important that companies start linking the consequences of their social and environmental behaviour to financial consequences” (Using the Internet...2010: 95). IIRC anticipates that the IR will be applied world-wide by 2020 (CPA 2011: 28).
The Figure 5 below indicates the state of the art of current corporate reporting and where it is expected to evolve by 2020. The separate strands of reporting should now be integrated into one report, but also leaving room for more detailed information for an interactive online version of the report published on the company’s web-page.
illustration not visible in this excerpt
Figure 5: The anticipated evolution of the corporate reporting. (IIRC 2011: 7)
The IR emerged in 2002 when the Danish company Novozymes published its first IR. Other early adopters were the Brazilian cosmetics company Natura (2003)and Danish diabetes company Novo Nordisk (2004) (Eccles and Saltzman 2011: 58). The motive for adoption was to measure and communicate the performance in terms of value created for people and society, not merely the dollars earned.
The organisations are expected to follow the „integrated thinking” principles where sustainability matters are embedded into every aspect of business strategy and operations and risk management (IIRC 2011: 6).As Belinda Willams from Vodacom SA put it (Newmarch2011: 64): “It is not reporting that should be integrated. It is the company’s strategy that needs to be integrated, and then reporting is a breeze.”
The adoption of IR has gained a worldwide momentum and should show further substantial increase in 2011-2012(refer to Figure6) considering all voluntary IIRC Pilot Program Companies and South African listed entities who were mandated to publishthe IR. By the end of 2010, there were 250 companies worldwide who published their IR. As can be seen on the graph, most of the IR’s are currently prepared in Europe and Australasia (Corporate Register 2011: 5). Nevertheless the IR practice makes up only a very small percentage comparing it to the total reporting output worldwide.
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Figure6: Published Integrated Reports per year and per region. (Corporate Register: 5)
The IRshould utilize the power of internet-based technologies (e.g. interactive websites, social media, forums, blogs and podcasts) in order to provide more detailed and layereddata (e.g. by using semantic zoom) than what is available only in hardcopy. It enables users to conduct their own financial and non-financial informationanalysis and communicate their findings and views with others(Krzus 2011: 271), while at the same time the organisation can gather valuable feedback on its strategy, objectives, performance and reporting transparency (Eccles, Armbrester 2011: 17). Internet based technologies, like Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 tools, can enhance effective stakeholder engagement that in turn drives companies to display greater openness, accountability and more transparent operations (Using the Internet...2010: 60). Many early adopters, such as Novo Nordisk, Natura and Philips, are leveraging interactive web solutions in presenting their IRto its advantage.
A presumption for a world-wide spread of IR adoption is the usability of the underlying non-financial data. Many countries worldwide (e.g. US, China, UK, Germany, Japan) have already successfully tagged the financial information in XBRL formatand development towards the non-financial XBRL taxonomy is in progress. The XBRL offers a transparent, fully machine-readable set of data accessible over the internet for analysis, benchmarking, auditing, and planning, or for decision making purposes(Watson, Monterio 2011: 78). Additional benefits can be gained from cloud computing by enabling companies to skip the step of installing systems for non-financial reporting. (Eccles, Armbrester 2011: 14,19)
Regardless of the sustainability imperative, the ultimate goal of a company is a higher share price. In order to thrive towards a higher share price in the long-term, a sustainable strategy is inevitable. IR ensures that the management follows a sustainable strategy. Moreover, it provides better transparency that enables a company to get full credit for its performance by making it easy for analysts and investors to get the information they need. (Ibid: 16)
Novo Nordisk, a Danish health-care company, is a great example of how the IR can be a contributing factor for sustainable long-term value creation. Figure 7 compares the company’s stock performance with competitors and the Amex Pharmaceutical Index. Novo Nordisk started reporting in an integrated manner from 2004 and, as can be seen from the graph, its stock price appreciation since 2006 has been substantially higher than those of competitors.
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Figure 7: Novo Nordisk share performance comparison with competitors during 2005-2011 (PbAbased on the idea presented in Eccles, Armbrester 2011: 17. The financial data is obtained from finance.yahoo.com)
Each IRis tailored to the specific needs of a business. The head of sustainability at JSE, Corli le Roux, has said that the IR is a journey and it is complex, because“it will take companies some time before they fully comply. We are not familiar with thinking about sustainability in a quantitative way. IR will make us rethink the way sustainability issues are measured and reported on” (Newmarch 2011: 63). Requiring companies to put financial and nonfinancial externalities on their balance sheets will improve the management of natural, human, and financial resources at the company and in aggregate at the country level (Eccles and Saltzman 2011: 61). A combination of market and regulatory forces will be required to make this happen, with the balance varying across countries (Eccles, Serafeim 2011: 71). In sustainability reporting many leading companies(Wal Mart, Puma, Tata Group, Procter & Gamble) have already taken the “comply or die” approach in which supply chain participants are required to fulfil stated sustainability standards in order to supply goods(Watson, Monterio 2011: 76). Similar behaviour can be expected in the IR practice.
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