Differences in annual report studies is baffling

By Dominic Jones

IF TWO groups of consultants independently review the online annual reports of the same group of companies around the same time, shouldn’t they arrive at similar results?

You would think so, but this story proves otherwise.

Last week I was alerted by PR Newswire blogger Mark Hynes to a survey his brother was involved with at UK consultancy Smiths Interactive. They looked at the online annual reports of the FTSE 100.

Then yesterday Radley Yeldar, another UK consultancy and design firm, released its own survey. It also is of the FTSE 100 annual reports.

And these two surveys have different findings for the same group of companies. You can compare them yourself, but here’s a summary of what I noticed:

Radley Yeldar found that 32% of the FTSE 100 offer a full HTML version.

Smiths Interactive found that 42% of the FTSE 100 companies provide full HTML reports.

Radley Yeldar reports that 31% provide downloadable PDF sections.

Smiths Interactive reports that 50% divide their PDFs into small sections.

Radley Yeldar says 18% of the FTSE 100 provided their financial statements in a spreadsheet format.

Smiths Interactive says 13% of the FTSE 100 do so.

We don’t cover the entire FTSE 100 so I can’t tell you definitively who is more right. But I’ve read both consultants’ reports and suggest you download the 80-page Radley Yeldar report (PDF 4.4 MB) first.

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