Early adopters of integrated reporting: The case of the mining industry in South Africa

This study aims to investigate the structure and the content of Integrated Reporting, a new corporate reporting model that seeks to link financial and non-financial information disclosed by companies. This paper assesses the nature and extent of non-financial disclosures in corporate reports of the mining companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. The methodological approach is Content Analysis with the aim of carrying out an automated lexical/textual analysis on the content of non-financial information using software for collecting a Corpus of data from the analysed corporate reports. The results do not highlight good practices of non-financial disclosure: the overall analysis does not detect homogeneous behaviour among companies. Nevertheless, the higher incidence of issues on Key Performance Indicators (KPI) targets and governance structures could be due to their relationship to certain listing requirements. The analysed period is restricted to one year, and it could be interesting to perform a longitudinal analysis. There is also a lack of a comparative analysis by means of the assessment of other industries in South Africa. Integrated Reporting is still in its early stages; consequently, findings from the first adopters may provide an insightful overview about its threats and weaknesses and practical suggestions for its preparers and users. The research may contribute to studies on the mining industry in the first country that has required the adoption of Integrated Reporting. The present study focuses on the first adoption of a new reporting tool that may be able to improve corporate communication to a wide range of stakeholders. Key words: Integrated reporting, textual analysis, disclosure index, non-financial information, mining industry, South Africa.