This report examines the patterns and evolution of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosure among companies listed in the SET100 between 2020 and 2024. It analyzes trends in the emphasis placed on different ESG topics, differences between annual reports and sustainability reports, consistency between Thai- and English-language disclosures, and reporting patterns across industries. The study aims to establish an empirical foundation for regulatory oversight, investment decision-making, and the development of Thailand’s capital market.
The study applies the Text Match Pre-Trained Transformer (TMPT), an artificial intelligence model, to more than 840 annual and sustainability reports published in Thai and English. It evaluates the intensity of disclosure across 13 topics covering environmental, social, governance, and economic dimensions. The analysis includes annual trends, bilingual consistency, the clustering of disclosure patterns, and comparisons across 11 industry sectors. Importantly, the resulting scores measure the intensity of corporate communication and disclosure rather than the quality of companies’ actual ESG performance.
The findings show that annual reports continue to place the greatest emphasis on economic issues, particularly broader economic impacts and production costs. By contrast, disclosures on greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution are concentrated primarily in sustainability reports rather than being integrated into annual reports. Human rights remain a major disclosure gap, with only 15.8% of reports addressing the topic meaningfully, while meaningful disclosure on water consumption is found in only 38.6% of reports. Thai- and English-language reports also differ across several topics, particularly social issues, potentially creating unequal access to information between domestic and international investors.
The report recommends integrating climate-related information and ESG risks into One Reports in alignment with ISSB standards, establishing minimum guidelines for human rights and water-related disclosure, and improving consistency between Thai- and English-language reports. ThaiBMA could use the findings to develop sector-specific disclosure benchmarks and support the assessment of ESG bond issuers, while CMDF could promote corporate capacity-building and establish an ongoing ESG disclosure monitoring system. The findings should nevertheless be interpreted in light of limitations concerning the availability of Thai-language reports in the earlier years of the study and the use of a fixed SET100 constituent list throughout the analysis period.
