Trends of CEO Messages in Corporate Sustainability Reports: Text Mining and CONCOR Analysis

Sustainability has become a central concern globally, and efforts to enhance it are being made across various fields. In line with this trend, corporate sustainability reports have become more widely published. These reports provide both financial and non-financial information on a company’s sustainability. In this context, this study aims to, first, analyze the key keywords contained in CEO messages. Second, it examines whether the keywords emphasized by CEOs change in response to shifts in corporate risk under economic uncertainty. Finally, it identifies how the categories of words included in these messages are classified. To address these research questions, text analysis was selected as the methodology. Specifically, a qualitative research approach using text mining and CONCOR analysis was conducted on the text from sustainability report. According to the Term Frequency and Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency analyses, the most frequently occurring keywords were ESG, Sustainable, Society, Stakeholders, Growth, Environment, Effort, and Future. Centrality analysis identified the following keywords as having high centrality: Sustainable, ESG, Society, Environment, Growth, Effort, and Stakeholders. Finally, CONCOR analysis revealed four clusters: Eco-friendly Energy, ESG Management, Global Crisis, and Technological Competitiveness. This study is significant in that it analyzes the major keywords and their changes within unstructured text data using text mining and CONCOR analysis, and it suggests the possibility of future quantitative analysis of non-financial information using these keywords.