Hållbar och framgångsrik? : samband mellan hållbarhetsprestanda och finansiella aspekter i börsföretag

Sammanfattning: Many companies have historically forced their interests through without any thoughts about the future needs of the humans and the society. In the last few years voices have been raised for a change, companies need to take their responsibility regarding sustainable development. The purpose of the report is to describe and explain possible relations between sustainabil-ity performance of companies and profitability, valuation, industry and size respectively. To be able to judge the sustainability performance of the companies Folksam (2006a) have been used. This is a solid investigation of the companies listed on the A- and O-lists of the Stockholm Stock Exchange by the end of 2005. The sustainability marks have been com-pared with the chosen key values for each hypothesis respectively. With this quantitative data as foundation, a quantitative approach and a deductive method have been used. In the first area of the investigation, profitability, the authors found correlation for the main hypothesis between sustainability performance and “Return on Total Assets” through a statistical test. The level of significance was very good and the correlation was lightly positive. The sub hypothesises showed no significance why a conclusion of relationship could not be drawn. Earlier studies in the area have mostly reported about positive relations which consequently are not supported. Regarding company valuation, the p/e-ratio is the most used key value and has therefore been chosen as main hypothesis. This investigation showed the best possible level of significance and a good, negative correlation. Further on the sub hypothesis did not show any significance. As the p/e-ratio is the key value of most importance the authors states a relationship between sustainability performance and valuation. This conclusion is in line with the earlier Swedish report by Hassel et.al. (2005) but contradicts the result from several foreign studies. The third investigation about the re-lationship between sustainability performance and industry showed a significant relation-ship. The industries which had the best sustainability performance were the Forest industry followed by “Vehicles & Mechanical engineering”, “Building” and “Mining & Metal”. Among the worst placed were different service industries like “IT”, “Media & Entertain-ment” and “Services”. This supports the theories which state that those with the highest risk regarding the influence on the environment and human rights also perform the best sustainability work. The last investigation was about the relationship between sustainability performance and the size of companies. The correlation test showed a palpable relation which also corresponds with the theories in the area. The relationship between sustainability performance and company size is positive.