Sustainability Disclosures among Constituent Stocks in Hang Seng Index

The corporate social responsibility is the initiative of the corporation to analyze and take liabilities for various the effects of the business. This includes social and environmental wellbeing. It can be seen as the constant commitment by organizations in behaving ethically. This has also been contributing to financial development. This is done by developing a quality of life of the business workforce.

The following report demonstrates the project feasibility under specific time-frame for Atlassian and Equitise in Australia. Then the aims and objectives are discussed along with particular research question. Then a critical literature review is conducted. Next, the way in which the project is organized in explained. Lastly, written communication is included that consists of the overall project plan.

The scenario of necessity to develop CSR activities at IT companies, Atlassian and Equitise in Australia are considered here. The former one is an enterprise software company involved in developing products for different content management, projects and software developers. On the other hand, the latter one is a popular leader under equity crowdfunding over the Internet. This is helpful for higher growth and new companies in partnering with different dependable investors (Tai & Chuang, 2014).

Different programs of corporate social responsibility have been continuing and extending their reach. The organizations have found themselves within extra pressure for their cost benefit. This is to possess their CSR initiatives to provide strong economic outcomes (Schwartz, 2017). However, there has been a debate what are the central aims of CSR programs. It depends on the timescale. Any effective strategy has been delivering more engaged employee, access the talent better, lessen the constraints of capitals and make a better reputation. It can provide smart business innovation in the longer term. This also includes the transformation of culture of firm and perspective of business.

As per as risks are concerned, the honest adoption of corporate social responsibility for the project needs a useful reformulation of decision making framework and organizational purpose.  This change has been implying and resting on the adopting of corporate culture. This has been encouraging the employees actively. This is to consider how the companies have been able to perform better in the world (Ni & Van Wart, 2015). Let, policies of CSR are adopted here, instead of the same type of tools to stimulate and foster in-depth modifications through this project. Thus soft results can be expected from the project outcomes as per as impacts and consequences of CSR are concerned.

The main aim of the project lies in the fact of how to find better brand recognition. This also involves the creation of a favorable business reputation and a rise in customer loyalty and sales. Further, the study aims to understand how by reducing the use of resources, emissions and wastes, one can help the environment and save money. Also, it is helpful to know how to access the finance, where the investors are likely to back reputable business, attract positive media attention like when to take part in activities of the community (Grayson & Hodges, 2017). Additionally, the research must be helpful to decrease the regulatory burden, through maintaining smart relationships with various local authorities that have often been making to perform the business more accessible. Apart from these new business opportunities are to be identified that includes the development of new services and products.

Relationship between Sustainability Reporting and Industry of Organizations

Besides, the objectives of the research include developing of public image, a rise of media coverage, boosting of employee engagement, attracting and retaining investors. Further, this also involves funding through matching reward programs, more participants of volunteers, forging corporate partnerships along with a rise in a varied source of revenue (Chernev & Blair, 2015). Moreover, the situation of the workplace environment must be favorable, and a rise in creativity, encouraging personal and professional growth and promoting individual philosophy.

The main research question for the study is:

• “What are the various necessities to develop CSR activities at IT companies?”

Saeidi et al. (2015) has shown that there has been an outstanding growth for customers in the fiscal year 2018. The year has ended with 125,796 customers and surpassed 100,000 cloud customers initially. Further, as per Huda et al. (2018), the migration of Confluence and Jira Cloud Customers are new to the latest AWS based cloud system. This has been one of the ambitious engineering projects in their history. A new identity of a brand has been launched at Summit of Atlassian on September 2018 at San Jose. It is mentioned by Hopkins (2016) that more than 200 million dollars of purchases have taken place at Atlassian Marketplace. This has been surpassing for a lifetime to 500 million dollars from the time of inception in 2012. Then there is the rise of an incredible team to about 25,000 staffs throughout the world. During the fiscal year of 2019, they have intended to push further ahead in markets that have been delivering the most effective returns to the customers, business teams, IT teams and Atlassian software teams according to Ruggie (2017).

Moreover, they must continue to extend their presence in business and software teams. This must sharpen the concentration to support necessities. Here, the IT departments have been changed accordingly as they have been encouraging and enabling the innovation that is technology driven as mentioned in the article of Cheng, Ioannou and Serafeim (2014). This also includes managing the rise in some applications. The business must deploy this through bringing the individual software movement. The present day’s IT teams have been more service-driven and efficiently agile-oriented. The products ate suited well to help in streamlining workflows and managing the moving prices around the organizations.

On the other hand, for Equitise, Australia, Cramer (2017) mentioned that a new tax regime was deployed to MIT or Managed Investment Trusts on May 2016. This was implemented within the amendments of Tax Laws or New Tax Systems regarding MITs. The AMIT or Attribution Managed Investment trust has also been permitting MIT to meet specific requirements for making a permanent choice to become an AMIT.  For allowing the fund for electing the AMIT tax regime, the constitution of a fund is amended and various conditions are adopted for the AMIT tax regime. This has been completed effectively July 2017. Besides, Epstein (2018) highlighted that the responsible entity has been no longer obligated contractually for paying distributions. The Responsible Entity has been no longer obligated contractually for paying distributions. Thus the units in the funds have been consequently reclassified from financial responsibility to equity. This took place in July 2017. Fernandez-Feijoo, Romero and Ruiz (2014) has highlighted how Equitise has been solving huge issues for various start-ups. They have needed to access the pre-series capital.

Correlations between Sustainability Reporting and Market Performance

Further, they have been raising capitals after seeding across and before the series. This has been common among various startups. However, this has been one of the complicacies has been happening in Australia. Besides, Equitise has been providing access to large net worth individuals who can take a business to a further level.

In the environment, there are numerous CSR activities. However, the most popular ones are community licenses and Pledge 1%.  The latter one is the initiative developed by Atlassian and various additional software editors such as Rally and Salesforce have a single goal. This is to motivate organizations and individuals to provide 1% of their product, equity, benefit and times.  Ob the community licenses is one of the free licenses offering free and unlimited permits that are for non-government and profit, non-commercial and non-academic (“Atlassian – Financials & Filings – Annual Report”, 2018). It is a perfect association with small budgets, who have been preferring to optimize the findings through Bitbucket tools, Confluence, JIRA Software which is helpful to focus on a budget of those areas. These are free and can focus on a budget on various regions. Further, various marketplaces add-ons are been paid by Atlassian for extending the function of the tools.

On the other hand, the effect of CSR on Equitise has been tremendous. However, any regulatory part of their business has needed to save the money of the company. Further, has helped them to cut back on costs like decreasing waste and use of resources. Having proper regulations, the company can spend money and support the scenario. In the lifetime of all business, it has been most likely that there is a necessity for funding. Besides, Equitise has better branding, bright business image, a transparent practice of business and tend to have easy access to funds (“CBG Australian Equities Fund Annual report”, 2018). Thus, as CSR has been helping the recognition of brands and development of the image of the brand has been inevitably helping with easy access to funds. Hence, the development of a CSR plan has been profoundly helpful for the franchise company to develop. Equitise’s CSR plan has been necessary to find out the results of the overall process of recruitment. This has included elements like supporting local charities and communities . Thus they can attract various like-minded people to join Equities. Moreover, Equitise’s well-through CSR plan is helpful to create the culture of the company. This has been a method to attract people who are like-minded.

Here, qualitative data analysis is done from various annual reports of Equities and Atlassian, Australia. This assessment would determine the vague and inexact concerns. It belongs to social and experimental realms. Here, the business and competitive benefits are the main elements of that analysis. Besides, various factors providing the organizations with enduring forces for competing with rivals are to be determined. Here, the results would be helpful to know how new technologies can be deployed and analyze the distinct approaches to resolve a problem with clients.

Task Name	Duration	Start	Finish
Analyzing the annual report of Atlassian and Equitise	285 days	Wed 8/29/18	Tue 10/1/19
Assessing overall corporate information	10 wks	Wed 8/29/18	Tue 11/6/18
Assessing various product-overview and different financial analysis	6 wks	Wed 11/7/18	Tue 12/18/18
Studying the MDA or Management Discussion and Analysis for Atlassian and Equitise	8 wks	Wed 12/19/18	Tue 2/12/19
Analyzing report on the overall corporate governance	10 wks	Wed 2/13/19	Tue 4/23/19
Stuying the shares on various shares of Atlassian and Equitise	4 wks	Wed 4/24/19	Tue 5/21/19
Predicting of the optimum control factor levels of Atlassian and Equitise	5 wks	Wed 5/22/19	Tue 6/25/19
Retrieving the auditors report	4 wks	Wed 6/26/19	Tue 7/23/19
Analyzing financial statements of Atlassian and Equitise	4 wks	Wed 7/24/19	Tue 8/20/19
Undergoing data analysis and various notes to accounts	6 wks	Wed 8/21/19	Tue 10/1/19

Understanding data collection and data analysis: 

For the project data scrapping must be done. Different tools like Scrapinghub, Content Grabber and Parsehub can be utilized. Here, data assessment is to be done with the help of frequencies to count different types of scores and value that are found to the overall information set. Further, various percentages are to be utilized to express the scores and value sets as the entire percentage.

Here the annual reports of Equities and Atlassian are used as the data sources.

• Annual report of Equities: https://www.eqt.com.au/~/media/equitytrustees/files/instofunds/cbg/cbg-australian-equities-fund-annual-report.pdf
• Yearly report of Atlassian: https://investors.atlassian.com/financials-and-filings/annual-reports/default.aspx

Conclusion: 

The above study is helpful to reveal the operating performances of Atlassian. However, they have not involved the effects of items that have never resulted from the central operations. Here, for planning the annual operating budget can be prepared. To allocate the resource, the study is helpful to develop their business performance of Equities. The data assessment is beneficial to measure the efficiency of business strategies. Through communicating with the board of directors of Equities, the financial performance can be determined. The study reveals how the management of Equities and Atlassian has been considering the free cash flow to become a liquidity measure. This provides helpful information to investors and management regarding a quantity of cash created by their business.

References:

Atlassian – Financials & Filings – Annual Report. (2018). Annual Report. [Web Log Post] Atlassian investor relations. Retrieved from Https://investors.atlassian.com/financials-and-filings/annual-reports/default.aspx.

CBG Australian Equities Fund Annual report (2018). CBG Australian Equities Fund Annual report For the year ended 30 June 201. Retrieved from https://www.eqt.com.au/~/media/equitytrustees/files/instofunds/cbg/cbg-australian-equities-fund-annual-report.pdf

Cheng, B., Ioannou, I., & Serafeim, G. (2014). Corporate social responsibility and access to finance. Strategic management journal, 35(1), 1-23.

Chernev, A., & Blair, S. (2015). Doing well by doing good: The benevolent halo of corporate social responsibility. Journal of Consumer Research, 41(6), 1412-1425.

Cramer, J. (2017). Corporate Social Responsibility and Globalisation: an action plan for business. Routledge.

Epstein, M. J. (2018). Making sustainability work: Best practices in managing and measuring corporate social, environmental and economic impacts. Routledge.

Fernandez-Feijoo, B., Romero, S., & Ruiz, S. (2014). Commitment to corporate social responsibility measured through global reporting initiative reporting: Factors affecting the behavior of companies. Journal of Cleaner Production, 81, 244-254.

Grayson, D., & Hodges, A. (2017). Corporate social opportunity!: Seven steps to make corporate social responsibility work for your business. Routledge.

Hopkins, M. (2016). The planetary bargain: corporate social responsibility comes of age. Springer.

Huda, M., Mulyadi, D., Hananto, A. L., Nor Muhamad, N. H., Mat Teh, K. S., & Don, A. G. (2018). Empowering corporate social responsibility (CSR): insights from service learning. Social Responsibility Journal, 14(4), 875-894.

Ni, A., & Van Wart, M. (2015). Corporate Social Responsibility: Doing Well and Doing Good. In Building Business-Government Relations (pp. 175-196). Routledge.

Ruggie, J. G. (2017). The theory and practice of learning networks: corporate social responsibility and the Global Compact. In Learning To Talk (pp. 32-42). Routledge.

Saeidi, S. P., Sofian, S., Saeidi, P., Saeidi, S. P., & Saaeidi, S. A. (2015). How does corporate social responsibility contribute to firm financial performance? The mediating role of competitive advantage, reputation, and customer satisfaction. Journal of business research, 68(2), 341-350.

Schrempf-Stirling, J., Palazzo, G., & Phillips, R. A. (2016). Historic corporate social responsibility. Academy of Management Review, 41(4), 700-719.

Schwartz, M. S. (2017). Corporate social responsibility. Routledge.

Tai, F. M., & Chuang, S. H. (2014). Corporate social responsibility. Ibusiness, 6(03), 117.