The Management Discussion and Analysis in China. An empirical analysis.

Abstract

Management Discussion and Analysis is a fundamental part of the annual report of a company. It is the narrative disclosure of the items presented in the financial statement and it introduces also forward-looking information about the future trends and developments of the company, giving to investors the instruments necessary to judge whether a company is valuable or not and to make investment decisions. MD&A was firstly introduced in the “Guides for Preparation and Filing of Registration Statements” issued in 1968 by the US Security and Exchange Commission and, since then, the regulations and guidelines for the preparation of the discussion and analysis have never stopped being developed on a worldwide scale. This thesis provides an overview on the MD&A situation in China, starting with an analysis about the evolution of the regulations and guidelines regarding the argument. The China Securities and Regulatory Commission introduced the Management Discussion and Analysis system in China in 2001 and, from that moment on, it has been improved constantly, in order to come into line with international standards. Nowadays, the system seems to have reached its maturity, but, as a matter of fact, it still presents some shortcomings, which, obviously, affect the quality of the disclosure. This aspect is one of the main themes of the researches conducted on the MD&A, which are reviewed in the second part of this work, with a special interest for those published by Chinese authors and related to the Chinese situation. The sources are divided in theoretical and empirical ones; the latter constitute the main inspiration for the analysis conducted by the author in the last chapter. The empirical analysis is executed on the annual reports of 30 Chinese listed companies, using two frameworks, which are built on the basis of the MD&A content requirements issued in the regulations of 2012 and 2015. The 2012 framework is applied to the annual reports of 2011 and 2012 and the 2015 framework is applied to the reports of 2014 and 2015, in order to study the level of information disclosure compared to the requirements issued by the regulations and to understand if an implementation of the requirements implies an higher MD&A disclosure level.