국내 新기업보고서 동향과 실태분석

As the business environment has changed in recent years, corporate stakeholders are more demanding a variety of firms’ non-financial information delivered by alternative or supplementary forms of informative reports as well as the traditional financial information. This study aims to examine the status and the trend of corporates’ sustainability reports (or new corporate reports) in South Korea, discuss anticipated problems, and suggest some proposals for the future of corporates’ sustainability reports. Our analysis indicates that the number of companies releasing sustainability reports increased from 4 companies in 2004 to 108 companies in 2016. The analysis also shows that corporates’ sustainability reports is mainly issued by large-sized companies and from the manufacturing industry. In addition, our finding presents that companies issues corporates’ sustainability reports mostly in May and June. The trend analysis indicates that the year-on-year percentage change in the number of corporates’ sustainability reports has been steadily decreasing since 2005. However, the percentage change seems to turn into an upward trend again as demands of institutional investors for non-financial information are growing with the adoption of the stewardship code in South Korea. To make corporates’ sustainability reports more informative and valuable to various stakeholders, systematic and detailed guidelines for the preparation and disclosure of the reports should be established soon.