Digital Transformation Payday

APPENDIX CHow to Compile a Unique Financial Database of More than 20,000 Annual Reports

As stated, this book focuses on digital transformation value implications for established capital market listed firms with a sufficient history to require a transformation from a given digital status‐quo to a more advanced digital outcome. Consequently, greenfield companies are not in scope. To achieve similar goals, related work has first typically included a broad variety of listed company portfolios, ranging from global surveys (Westerman, Bonnet, and McAfee 2014), to various US companies (Beutel 2018; Chen and Srinivasan 2019) and exclusively Europe‐centric approaches (Hossnofsky and Junge 2019; Kawohl and Hüpel 2018; Wroblewski 2018). Second, the authors applied divergent data sources (COMPUSTAT, CRSP, IBES, Thomson Reuters DataStream and annual reports) for financial analysis. Therefore, clear choices were required for these two key research foundations.

Different global stock indexes have carefully been considered to construct the final listed large corporate portfolio for analysis. In the end, after a cautious assessment—the NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE)—two US‐based regional stock exchanges for large corporates turned out to be the best‐fitting choice. They were found to provide a good match across all data requirements. First, due to the focus on US‐listed companies, geographical market context differences are of less relevance for the planned valuation approach. ...