The Role of Sustainability Statements in Investor Relations: An Analysis of the Annual Reports of Airline Companies

Investors are one of the primary target audiences for corporate communication; they seek non-financial as well as financial information from the companies they invest in, and they consider the social and environmental sustainability of these companies in addition to their economic sustainability. Because of this, as a tool for investor relations, annual reports now routinely and regularly incorporate non-financial information. This study examined thirty annual reports from six public airline firms issued between 2018 and 2022. A total of 8115 expressions on social, economic, and environmental sustainability issues—divided into 125 themes—were coded and analyzed in Maxqda 2020. Among the conclusions was the fact that, in 2022, all of the examined companies devoted 9% of their pages to sustainability statements and included them as an individual topic in their reports. It was found that 64% of both the sustainability-related pages of the reports and the messages of the company managers included in the report consisted of social sustainability statements, with the theme of governance playing an important role in these explanations. Additionally, it was revealed that the topics of governance issues (22.6%), the natural environment (21.7%), and human resources development (15.5%) are the most frequently discussed social, environmental, and economic sustainability themes in corporate annual reports.