Online disclosure: an analysis of Egyptian listed companies

Abstract

The internet becomes a very useful information disclosure tool in the recent years. Many corporations begin to disseminate their information on their websites to support the different needs of their stakeholders. Internet financial reporting has unique characteristics. These include, the ability to disseminate the information to wide audience on more timely basis and using different types of information format such as (hypertext, multiple file format (PDF, HTML) and using multimedia). As the internet financial reporting practices are voluntary, many companies can improve their disclosure with both the content and presentation of the disclosed information. Consequently, many studies in developed countries have argued the potential effect of using the internet in disclosing the information and the determinants of disseminating the information on the companies’ websites. The study extends the scope of the previous Egyptian studies by examining the entire Egyptian listed companies (435) in December 2007, investigating the disclosure of corporate governance information in detail, investigating the social disclosure information on the website and checking the timeliness of the disclosed information. The results reveal that 225 companies (51.7%) of the sampled companies have website and among these companies (98.7%) disclosed social information, (91.1%) disclosed corporate governance information, (48%) disclosed timeliness information and (35.6%) disclosed financial information.