A Case Study on ESG Management Activities: Focusing on Representative Companies by Industry in Korea

Corporate ESG management is becoming an essential element of social responsibility beyond the paradigm. Companies are aiming not only for profit-seeking but also for sustainable environmental, social, and economic development. For sustainable development, companies seek to communicate with various stakeholders based on social responsibility activities. This study aims to analyze ESG management cases by industry based on sustainability reports containing major achievements related to sustainable management. Keywords from the perspective of GRI by industry were extracted to identify key elements of construction, transportation, warehouse, and manufacturing. In addition, in order to analyze the trend of ESG activities based on the extracted keywords, representative companies for each industry were selected and case analysis was performed through text mining. Looking at the results of this study, it was found that the construction industry focuses on the environment in 2015 and government factors in 2022. It was found that the transportation and warehouse industry focuses on society in 2015 and the environment in 2022. The manufacturing industry was found to focus on all ESG areas in 2015 and on governance in 2022. Through this, it was found that the ESG activities of representative companies by industry were closely related to GRI and were consistent with industrial characteristics. The results of this analysis confirmed the importance of sustainability reports and changes in trends in sustainable management by industry. This study presented the diversification and differentiation of strategies by identifying ESG key factors by industry, and further emphasized the importance of sustainability reports as ESG management became standardized. In addition, it is judged to be an academic data that is the basis of the analysis method by text mining unstructured data.