A more advanced and modern corporate governance brings with it superior performance and is able to assess the risks deriving from internationalization more correctly.
A reality that became even more important during the crisis due to the pandemic, where companies whose governance has evolved had a decline in turnover of 6.8%, compared to 9.1% of companies that had a worsening in their own. governance.
This was revealed in the 2022 Report of the Corporate Governance Lab of SDA Bocconi and produced with the contribution of PwC TLS, Banca Generali and NUO and which analyzed the 5,398 Italian companies with turnover exceeding 50 million euros, monitoring their governance and ownership structure in the two-year period 2018-2020.
This, according to the research, led companies with a loss compared to 2019 up by 7.1% among those worsening governance index, compared to 5.2% of companies with stable index and 4.4% of those improving.
The corporate governance index (ICG) is calculated on the basis of five parameters and according to the research in 2020 the diversity of the Board of Directors, i.e. heterogeneity of the Board by gender balance, age and geographical origin, increased in 229 companies, the Board of Directors was was introduced and opened to external directors in 79 and 182 cases respectively, while 377 firms separated the roles of president and chief executive officer, and 251 moved into individual leadership, bringing firms with a growing ICG to 771, i.e. 14% of the total.
A growth, therefore, found in each of the five parameters, numbers that mean that the most present in the 5,398 Italian companies analyzed is the presence of a Board of Directors, operating in 83% of the companies;
followed by having individual leadership, in 66% of cases;
by the presence of external advisors, 49% of the companies;
while 46% of the companies separate the positions of chairman and chief executive officer, with diversity at the bottom, present in 16% of the companies.
According to the research, companies with the highest ICG have a 2.22% chance of being present in countries with low political risk but only 0.86% in those with high political risk, while for those with a lower ICG index it is the opposite: they have a 1.27% chance of investing in countries with a lower risk, compared with an almost double chance (2.44%) of being in more problematic countries.
In collaboration with:
Banca Generali
