Purpose. A company’s business model (BM) is considered an adequate framework for non-financial reporting. As the BM illustrates how a company combines resources and competences to create and capture its value, it sheds light on some aspects of the business that are not encompassed in the traditional financial reporting. In this perspective, the description of a company’s BM might offer users valuable information about a company’s intellectual capital or environmental and social engagement. Focusing on sell-side financial analysts, who are considered a proxy for investors, this study aims to verify whether companies’ disclosure about their BM affects the use of such information by analysts. Design. This analysis focused on a sample of industrial and services companies listed on the FTSE-MIB segment of Italian Stock Exchange. For all sample companies, we downloaded 2013 annual reports (ARs) and all issued analyst reports from the Italian Stock Exchange website. We examined companies’ annual reports because ARs are considered as a proxy for all the communication channels they use. According to the model proposed by Osterwalder et al. (2005), we content analyzed both the description of BM elements in a company’s annual report and its analyst reports. In content analyzing texts of narrative sections of annual reports, we did not adopt an approach based on word-count, but we referred to two dimensions: “focus”, which is the capacity of a description to illustrate how a certain BM element contributed to generate value; “completeness”, which refers to the capacity of the description to cover all the elements characterizing BM. We used a multiple regression analysis to verify whether the company’s BM disclosure is related to the use of BM information in analyst reports. Findings. Our results show that the better the disclosure of BM in annual reports, the more likely BM information is present in the reports issued by analysts. Practical implications. As our results showed that financial analysts appreciate BM disclosure, they confirmed the need of an integrated reporting system, which includes non-financial information. Originality/value. Few studies, to our knowledge, investigated the presence of BM in analyst reports and no study examined the relationship between the presence of BM in analyst reports and the disclosure by firms about BM. In this study we propose a new methodological approach to the investigation of BM disclosure from two points of view: first, the analysis is based on an ontology; second, we did not adopt a word-count model, but we investigated the quality of the communication on the basis of its capacity to convey focused and complete information.
Key-Words: Reporting integrato, Business Model, Analyst reports, Annual Report, Sell-side analysts
