Integrated reporting and non financial information. The case of the mining industry in South Africa

Purpose - This study aims to investigate the structure and the content of Integrated Reporting, a new corporate reporting model, which seeks to link financial to non-financial information disclosed by companies. We explored the nature and extent of non-financial disclosures in Integrated Reports of the Mining companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. Design/Methodology/Approach - The methodology approach is Content Analysis and lexical/textual analysis and we used TaLTaC2 software for collecting Corpus of data from companies’ corporate reports. Findings - The results do not allow us to highlight the best practices of non-financial disclosure: the overall judgement does not detect a homogeneous behavior among companies: nevertheless, we noted that the higher incidence of certain issues could be due to the relationship to certain listing requirements. Research limitations/implications – The analyzed period is restricted to one year and it might be interesting to perform a longitudinal analysis. There is also a lack of a cross-country analysis by means of the assessment of other developing countries. Practical implications – Integrated Reporting is still in an early stage, consequently findings from the first adopters may provide an insightful overview about its threats and weaknesses and practical suggestions for its preparers and users. Originality/value – The research gives a contribution to the studies on the Mining industry in a developing country and it can extend the analysis on a new reporting tool, which may be able to improve corporate communications to a wide range of stakeholders.