Sustainable Business Models in the Automotive Sector: A Perspective from the Relationship of Financial Statements with ESG Criteria

Abstract

Nowadays, there are numerous studies about the implementation of sustainable practices and their impact to evaluate the performance of a company in three key sustainability areas: environmental, social and corporate governance, better known as ESG criteria (ESG). In the automotive sector, several approaches and methodologies stand out, some of them focus on identifying barriers to sustainable manufacturing in small and medium-sized businesses, others use models to evaluate automotive sustainability based on design attributes and some others focuses on the standardization of financial and sustainability reporting. The purpose of this work is to establish relationships between the Total ESG Risk Index, its environmental, social and corporate governance components and four of the most important variables taken from the financial statements (income by sales, profit or net profit, total assets and market value). To achieve this goal, it was used a multiple regression model in a database for the twenty largest companies in the automotive sector around the world.