FAQs

1. Are the winners of these awards the most trusted companies in Malaysia?

These awards are not meant to declare a company as the most trusted or trustworthy. Rather, the awards aim to recognise companies who are making the best attempts to build trust through their communications and interactions with their key stakeholders (i.e. investors and customers).

2. Why do you confine these awards to PLCs only?

In our first year, we decided to look at PLCs only as the first part of our methodology was a benchmarking of annual reports against the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC)’S Integrated Reporting <IR> Framework. This helps us assess how transparent PLCs are in their communications, as well as how integrated in their thinking they are in order to communicate their value story beyond just the financials.

3. What about smaller companies?

While we benchmarked Bursa Malaysia’s  Top 50 PLCs (above RM1 Billion in market capitalisation) based on how well they communicated in their Annual Reports, we are not only looking for the businesses that are posting the highest profits.

The two components covered by our methodology (i.e. excellence in corporate reporting and public perception) allow us to take a broader, more objective approach to the judging process; one that is not dependent on the size of the company and complexity of the business alone. After all, building trust is a journey, relevant to both established and growing businesses. What differentiates the winners are their efforts and the impact they are making on the stakeholders that matter to them.

For future awards, and as the Malaysian corporate reporting market matures, we may consider evaluating smaller companies as well.

4. As your IR and trust profiling work was done against data in 2014, how reliable is that given these awards will be announced towards the end of 2015? Are you comfortable it is still relevant/valid?

The companies have varying financial year-end periods, from 30 June 2014 until 31 January 2015. Majority of the companies have not yet released their latest annual report, so our <IR> benchmarking scores are up-to-date.

Similarly, data for the trust profiling is pulled from 1 January 2014 – 31 December 2014 as that is the common period for which the companies’ reporting covers. At the time we did the trust profiling (June 2015), it would have been too early for us to look at 2015 data.  

While this means that we are measuring public perception at a particular point in time in the past, our Awards aims to recognise a company’s journey in building trust. To do so as objectively as possible, we have to use the latest data that is available for both measures (<IR> and trust profiling) and over a similar period of time. Therefore, the data used for the Awards is still relevant and valid.

5. How confident is PwC that the trust profiles are an accurate representation of public perception of these companies?

Information for the trust profiles were taken from publicly available digital information (i.e. anything on social media, investor forums, blogs, news sites etc). To ensure an accurate and robust analysis of all the relevant conversation from these sources, care was taken to ensure representative samples were included according to four criteria:

• for each of the 12 months across the period January – December 2014
• according to where the conversation took place (i.e. channel)
• according to the relevant stakeholder, i.e. customer conversation is different from investor conversation
• according to the relevant industry conversations, depending on whether the company in question has a B2B or a B2C model

6. In gathering digital information for the trust profiles, how does PwC Malaysia distinguish between company-generated information and content created internally e.g. what if it’s the company's own staff or if they’ve employed bots etc?

For trust profiling, we use an online data scraping tool which has in-built features to filter out spambots.

For investor data, we only collected data from sources which investors tend to frequent such as investors forum, expert blogs and traditional media. For consumer data, we sampled data mainly from social media e.g., Facebook, Twitter.

We ruled out sources such as company websites and company-owned platforms.

7. What does an award winner receive?

The award winner will receive an award trophy. They will also receive an awards stamp and guidelines on messaging to use in their marketing collaterals.

8. How can I or my company participate in these Awards?       

In our first year, we have not opened these Awards up for submissions, but have evaluated PLCs based on the methodology we have described here. If you are interested in participating or having your company evaluated in future years, please contact us for a discussion.