Développements récents et à venir en matière de Corporate Reporting - Application pratique et analyse d'un business case

Abstract

It has been a while now that business players and companies’ stakeholders have recognized that financial reports alone are not sufficient anymore to represent the real economic value of a company. In fact, the business world has over the past few decades gone through what some call the « Third Industrial Revolution », which started at the end of the twentieth century with the occurrence of information and communication technologies as well as the increasing part of intangible assets in companies’ balance sheets. Along with this business revolution, the shift in companies’ stakeholders’ expectations towards the business world has also been important. Indeed, general audience is getting more and more interested in knowing the reality that lies behind companies and nowadays, consumers want to better know how a company operates, investors want to have a broader range of information before deciding which organization to invest in, governments and society at large are also willing to be taken into account by companies as fully-fledged stakeholders. These major trends brought economic players to try to redefine what business reporting is. Further to this, the field of Corporate Reporting emerged and has been developing a lot over the past years. In fact, many companies understood the importance of issuing non-financial information in their annual reports in addition to the classical financial information. All these elements made us decide to analyze how far BEL 20 companies have gone through the Corporate Reporting journey. To do so, we decided to use the IIRC’s Integrated Reporting framework as the basis for our analysis because this framework is widely recognized as the most promising Corporate Reporting initiative throughout the world. This work will eventually provide us with a basis for analysis to determine whether BEL 20 companies have embarked on the path to Corporate Reporting, and whether they could need help to better report on non-financial information and then fully embrace the new reporting trends.