In the last 4 weeks Gisi, Marco, Jürgen and I have gone through 378 corporate websites to find out the current status of online corporate reporting of big cap European and US companies. Since 2003 our survey includes companies of indices Dow Jones, EuroStoxx 50, DAX/MDAX, ATX, SMI and since 2005 FTSE 100 and AEX/AMX. Currently we are expanding this survey to include MIB, CAC and TSX. With this expansion more than 500 of the biggest companies in the world would be part of the biggest and most elaborate survey in the online corporate reporting industry.
In the first step we distinguished 3 options for annual reports offered on the internet. We experience this differentiation also as evolutionary progress over the last years.
- The report is offered solely as PDF download [2009: 31.2%]
- A JPG-show is available: Every page of the printed report is copied 1:1 as JPG [2009: 22.2%]
- The report is implemented as fully-fledged HTML website to make full use of the web. [2009: 46.6%]
Overall the figures are nearly unchanged compared to last year with a slight comeback of JPG-Show increasing by 0.8%.
Most interesting is the detailed view by index. Whereas those countries with strong portions of fully-fledged websites have increased their HTML portion e.g. UK from 58% to 63%. Countries with a poor history of HTML reports seem to demoralise their best practice companies e.g. in Switzerland HTML declining from 16.7% to 6.3%!