Abstract
This chapter provides an empirical analysis of the sustainability reporting practices of two multinational companies: the German IT company SAP, which operates in the software sector, and the Swedish retailer H&M, one of the most popular brands in the fast fashion industry. Both companies encounter different approaches/sustainability issues when explaining their commitment to sustainability. The aims of this chapter are twofold. On the one hand, it will provide an exemplificative illustration of how the business model tool can be used to interpret the information included in a company’s sustainability reporting, according to the proposal formulated in Chap. 3 of this volume. On the other hand, analyzing two leading companies, both of which provide benchmarks for their respective industries, will offer us insights on whether or not a business case can be made for sustainability, and how sustainability is implemented in the organization and integrated into the company’s value processes.
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- 1.
As at December 31, 2018, SAP SE directly or indirectly controlled a worldwide group of 265 subsidiaries that develop, distribute, and provide products, solutions, and services.
- 2.
Both the Independent Auditor’s Report and the Independent Assurance Report for non-financial information are available in the Independent Auditor’s Report section and the Independent Assurance Report section.
- 3.
Fast fashion retailing is often seen as the McDonaldization of fashion (Ritzer 2008), as it has attributes similar to a McDonald’s fast food restaurant. McDonaldization is the process through which business ideas associated with the fast-food industry come to dominate other unrelated sectors (Ritzer 2008). Just as McDonald’s only takes a couple of minutes to produce food, fast fashion retailers have agile supply options that allow them to produce products in a month, as opposed to the nine to twelve month range upon which other fashion retailers rely. Also, like McDonald’s, the products produced by fast fashion retailers are inexpensive (Chang and Jai 2015).
- 4.
- 5.
H&M Annual Report 2018, available at https://about.hm.com/en/about-us/corporate-governance/annual-report.html.
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
The ranking is produced annually by Newsweek in collaboration with leading environmental research organizations.
- 11.
See Sect. 3.2.4.
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Bini, L., Bellucci, M. (2020). Business Model Disclosure in Sustainability Reporting: Two Case Studies. In: Integrated Sustainability Reporting. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24954-0_4
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