Sustainability Performance Relation to Financial Performance : A quantitative study of companies in the textile industry within the European and North American markets

Background: Light has been shed on the textile industry as one of the leading industries when it comes to economic growth, global warming and sustainable development. The increasing demand for sustainable activities from stakeholders has led to the importance of measuring the sustainable development of companies. ESG reporting is a common tool used to indicate a company’s sustainability performance. Prior research has tended to focus on cross-sectional industries, and therefore a gap was identified for industry specific research. Purpose: The purpose of this research is to explain the relationship between sustainability performance and financial performance in the textile industry in the European and North American markets to see if companies that invest in sustainability activities benefit financially. Method: This research has followed a positivistic paradigm, with deductive reasoning and a quantitative approach. A probability sampling approach was performed by conducting secondary data from Thomson Reuters DataStream of companies in the textile industry in Europe and North America. This resulted in a final sample of ESG scores and ROIC of 44 companies. The data was later analysed in the SPSS software program by following the estimation method Ordinary Least Squares (OLS). Findings: The literature review developed two hypotheses to address the research purpose and questions. The two hypotheses were analysed through two regression analyses that were satisfied through the OLS estimation method. The result showed that there was a significant relationship between the aggregated ESG score and ROIC which supported the first hypothesis. The second hypothesis of the multiple regression model showed that each component of ESG is correlated to ROIC, however, the environmental factor was not statistically significantly related. Conclusion: The thesis showed that there is a positive relationship between ESG performance and ROIC in this study. This implies that companies that invest in sustainable development increase their financial performance. The aggregated ESG score as well as the social factor and the governance factor had the highest impact on ROIC, which is supported by the stakeholder theory as there has been an increasing demand on social and governance activities in the textile industry. This further supports that sustainability performance impact on financial performance is industry specific.