Sustainable Value Creation : - A case study with three major Swedish airlines

Abstract:   The airline industry and Sustainable ValueThe airline industry are, by many, considered to be an industry with a high level of environmental impact, in other words an environmental destroyer. Although some argue that it still does only produces a small part of the world’s total emissions it is still an industry under high pressure from regulatory institutions and customers. Sustainable value is a rather new concept and allows the user measure a company’s social and/or environmental performance in monetary terms, which is the main difference from many financial calculation models. The ADVANCE sustainable value method is based on theories of opportunity costs and can give indications in terms of efficiency in comparison to a chosen benchmark.Purpose With the use of this method we are interested in finding out if an airline can create a sustainable value even though they are performing an activity that, for some, is seen as destroying the environment? The sustainable value method prime users would be stakeholders such as investors and as many companies in the airline industry are non-public companies, we also aim to discuss a wider range of usage for this method such as for the management internal decision process. MethodWe have chosen three major Swedish airlines to base our calculations on by using a nonprobability selection. We have excluded companies that are not registered in Sweden, does not provide actual passenger transport, are so called “virtual airline” and/or have not any publicly available information. A virtual airline, in this context, refers to an airline that does not own or lease any own aircrafts and instead are buying passenger chairs from another airline, called codesharing. We will benchmark our calculations towards the Swedish GDP and the Swedish Transport sector. Theoretical frameworkThe management’s task is to, among other things, implement measures for the management accountants to use in their work. Corporate Sustainable Responsibility’s (CSR) general idea is to act responsible towards the most important questions for their stakeholders such as investors, government etc. CSR has led to that more sustainability information to stakeholders is produced, the type of information that we are using in our calculations.Our findingsBy the use of the ADVANCE method we can see that in fact airlines, despite the high preasure can create a positive Sustainable Value while comparing to the transport sector. We also argue the method can be used by the management as a complement to their other financial measures as it gives other efficiency indications than traditional methods.