Intangibles: Do companies disclose relevant information?

The aim of this project is twofold: • First, it examines whether and to what extent high-tech companies provide information about IC elements in the sections devoted to the BM and risks. • Second, it assesses the correspondence and level of integration between the IC elements disclosed in the BM section and those reported in the risk section. Although our choice may hamper generalisation to other industries, we have examined high-tech companies because their success largely depends on their use of IC, and we expected to find good examples of IC disclosure. We have selected the three sectors identified as 'high-tech' by Eurostat: pharmaceuticals; computers and electronics; and air and spacecraft. Because the EU Directive 2014/95 should have been implemented by the end of 2017 by all member countries, we have examined the 2018 annual reports to confirm whether all the nations under investigation implemented such regulations. This study makes three distinctive contributions by analysing: (i) IC disclosure in annual reports of high-tech companies in a mandatory context, (ii) IC disclosure in two specific sections of the annual report (i.e. business model section and risk section) to investigate the role of IC in the value creation process and the related risks, and (iii) the integration and level of correspondence of the IC information disclosed in these two sections.