The Role of Strategic Plan Presentations of Listed Companies as Supplementary Communication Tool

The sudden collapse of well-regarded and much celebrated companies like Enron, Vivendi, or Parmalat has highlighted the inability of traditional financial statement to fully cope with the information needs of the financial markets. A possible solution is extending the scope of business reporting to incorporate greater discussion of the critical drivers of business success, more non-financial performance indicators, and more forward-looking information (FLI). A second approach suggests using press releases, company websites, meetings with the management, conference calls and presentations to the financial community as a means of integrating communication. In the paper, for the first time, presentations of strategic plans to analysts and investors are studied as integrative communication tool for voluntary disclosure of FLI. Findings show that strategic plan presentations contain a significant amount of FLI and that the variables related to the amount of FLI contained in strategic plan presentations are the same variables related to other communication tools for voluntary disclosure, thus providing evidence that companies may use strategic plan presentations as a supplementary communication tool