The online annual report's catch-up race

5 aug 2008

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The 2007 annual report season has just come to a close. Most companies are now publishing their second-quarter figures. This is an opportunity for Jungle Rating to look back briefly at the recent online annual report season. This year, we once again witnessed an increase in companies publishing their figures online (HTML) in addition to a print version or a PDF document. Companies are becoming aware of the fact that the internet, instead of print, should be the starting point when making an online report.

A short history of the online annual report

For as long as we can remember, companies have been publishing annual reports. They are accountability documents for the past year. Until the advent of the computer, annual reports were printed works that filled the bookcases of many financially interested parties.

From print to PDF

With the arrival of the internet, companies also began to publish their annual reports online in PDF format. The advantage of the PDF format is that it enables companies to publish their annual reports one-on-one online. Readers, including analysts, the press and investors, can easily download the document and print it out. The main disadvantage of PDF, however, is that it’s difficult to read on-screen and provides relatively little opportunity for navigation and searches.

From PDF to a dynamic annual report

It wasn’t long before a solution presented itself: a ‘dynamic’ or ‘image-based’ annual report. The idea was to scan all the pages of an annual report and place them in a navigation menu. This made it a little easier to scroll through the document on-screen than with a PDF. The main disadvantage, however, is that as a company – and as a user – you are still limited to the layout and structure of the printed version. Format and content are therefore set in stone, both with PDFs and dynamic annual reports. Moreover, visitors will have to scroll a lot, or enlarge and reduce, since the size of a page does not correspond to the average screen. (See here an example of a dynamic annual report by Kimberly & Clark.)

HTML annual report: the annual report as website

For about five years now, an increasing number of companies have been publishing their annual reports as separate websites: the HTML annual report. The main advantage of an HTML annual report is that the printed annual report no longer has to function as the guiding version for the online one. Which means that, based on audited information, companies can make far better use of the internet’s unique possibilities.

Examples of online annual reports

Provided below are several examples of online annual reports from Danske Bank, Deutsche Post and KPN.

Danske Bank

Danske Bank makes it immediately clear that the layout of an online annual report doesn’t have to be determined by the printed version of the annual report.

As soon as the visitor opens the 2007 annual report website (the ‘group accounts’), the face of Tonny Thierry Andersen, the bank’s senior executive vice president, appears. He takes the visitor through a splendidly animated presentation lasting five minutes about Danske Bank’s 2007 performance.
In addition, Danske Bank also provides coverage of analyst presentations and the press conference.
Danske Bank also offers clearly legible tables and the option of viewing the table data in the form of a graph, or of downloading them as Excel files.
It wouldn’t surprise us if the short Danske Bank film was also available on Danske Bank’s intranet. This would give employees a good opportunity to review their company’s performance.

Deutsche Post

This wasn’t the first year that Deutsche Post published an online annual report. The Germans provide a useful service in their 2007 annual report, namely a ‘key figures comparison tool’.

Visitors can make their own analyses based on huge amounts of financial figures for the years 2000 to 2007.
Visitors can choose the format in which they want to view the information: table, bar chart or graph.
In addition, visitors can export the selected information to Excel, as an image (JPEG) or to print out.

KPN

KPN uses tabs to switch between three documents: the annual report, the annual accounts and the sustainability report.
KPN also has a video in which CEO Ad Scheepbouwer updates visitors on the state of affairs.
A nice bonus in the KPN annual report is the annual calendar containing a number of milestones achieved in the previous year.

In conclusion, we can state that companies such as Danske Bank, Deutsche Post and KPN make effective and clever use of the internet for financial reporting. Of course, the starting point remains factual and audited information. The format of the online annual report, however, is no longer determined by the print version but by the possibilities offered by the internet medium itself, which is a good and essential development.
An extra advantage of this format is that the annual report (or at least parts of it) is easier to understand and more relevant for non-financial target groups, such as employees or job-seekers. The internet has a lot to offer, also for financial reporting…