Company’s CSR spending vs target segment

Abstract

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) implies a concept whereby companies voluntarily contribute to a better society and a cleaner environment – a concept whereby the companies integrate social and other useful concerns in their business operations for the betterment of their stakeholders and society in general. The companies act, 2013 under section 135 makes it mandatory for companies to spend a minimum of 2% of average net profits made during 3 immediately preceding financial years. Companies with Net worth over 500 crores / turnover over 1000 crores and net profit over 5 crores in the previous financial year fall under the purview of this law. The projects aims to understand the CSR spend behaviour of companies with respect to various factors and the primary of them being the market they cater to bottom of the pyramids market vs others. Other categorisation that are considered are Enterprise businesses (B2B) vs Consumer businesses (B2C) and comparison among industries. The project broadly consisted of 3 steps confirmation data points & identifying data sources, collection of these data points & analysis of the data for insights. Financial metrics collected include sales, PAT, Advertisement expenditure, RnD expenditure, Assets, Equity, Reserves, ROE, ROA, Debt to Equity ratio & CSR expenditure data. The data was to be collected from post 2013. i.e 2013- 2022 for eight financial years. We used the data CSR data base available in the library resources for collecting the CSR expenditure of the companies & CMIE prowess data base was used to map the financial metrics of the companies with the CSR data. Companies listed in BSE & NSE were taken as our initial data base which was later cleansed to remove compnies without significant CSR spend & missing data. Annual reports of these companies were used to validated the metrics & classify them into B2B & B2C companies. Tracxn database was also used to identify the products of the data and validate the offerings of the company in classifying the into B2B & B2C companies. Data hereto was be analysed in state and regressed to identify the correlation between the CSR spend of the companies, their sector & offerings. The analysis showed that ROA and CSR expenditure had a negative correlation while Advertisement expenditure & R&D expenditure had a positive correlation with CSR expenditure. B2B companies had significantly more CSR expenditure compared to B2C companies