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ly on their stockbrokers.
· The majority regard the directors’ report as the most useful section of
the annual report.
· The auditors’ report is the least useful section.
These recent, albeit non-UK, studies suggest a number of changes have
occurred in private shareholder attitudes towards the annual report. Along
with the L&T (and other) surveys, they provide a useful backdrop against
which the opinions of UK private shareholders in the 1990s can be assessed.
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY AND RESULTS
The main aim of the project is to gauge the extent of ordinary shareholders’
reading of the annual report. It is the earlier questionnaire-based study by
L&T which we aim to replicate, at least in relation to shareholders’ reading
of the annual report.
Methodology
Resource constraints prevented an interview-based approach.
3
We do not
consider that our use of a postal questionnaire necessarily weakens our findings,s. a. bartlett & r. a. chandler 250
and we justify our choice of research method on the grounds not only of cost
but also with the fact that the results of the L&T interviews do not appear to
be significantly diVerent from the results of their postal questionnaire.
Our questionnaire contains questions similar to those asked in the L&T
studies, taking into account subsequent developments in financial reporting.
The questionnaire was tailored to reflect the particular contents of the latest
annual report of the company selected. The company was chosen at random
from the companies listed in The Times Top 100 in 1994 which had filed
their registers of shareholders within the 12 months prior to October 1994;
this would ensure that the register was as up to date as possible. A copy of
the company’s latest shareholder register was obtained from Companies
House and was used as the basis for the extraction of a random sample of
300 UK private shareholders (i.e. excluding all institutional, nominee,
director and overseas shareholders). The questionnaires were mailed to the
sample of shareholders inDecember 1994. To honour the pledge to potential
respondents that their anonymity was guaranteed, no identifying marks or
numbers were used on the questionnaires despatched4
; this prevented
identification of non-respondents. A reminder to prompt non-respondents
could only be sent to the entire sample at the risk of infuriating those who
had replied. It was therefore decided not to performany follow-up procedure;
however, we did test for non-response bias, as detailed below.
Company profile
The company surveyed was a largemulti-national pharmaceuticals company.
The company’s latest annual report, for the year ending 30 June 1994, was
approved by the Board on 15 September 1994. It is therefore likely that
the shareholders would have received their copy of the report shortly after
the latter date, i.e. a few months prior to receiving our questionnaire.
In style and format, the surveyed company’s annual report is similar to
the reports produced by many large companies.
Results
This section reports on the response rate and background variables relating
to respondents. It should be stressed that we are investigating the use of
the annual report by small shareholders in the selected company; we estimate
that the average shareholding of our sample 本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。