Evaluating Performance Incorporating Multi-Criteria Decision Making and ESG Index: The Case of Taiwanese PCB Industry

The Printed Circuit Board (PCB) industry is known as the "mother of electronic system product" in the high-tech electronics industry. When this industry enters a mature stage, cost control becomes the key to its success. Additionally, as the corporate’s awareness of social responsibility like ESG (Environment, Social, & Governance) has risen, the cost control remains a critical indicator for evaluating a company's performance. This study uses the consolidated financial statements of 35 companies in Taiwan's listed PCB industry through collecting data from the Taiwan Stock Exchange from 2022 to 2022. This study chooses 16 key financial indicators through expert opinions and selects 7 input variables and 5 output variables from 5 screening criteria. Then, through the normalization of grey relational data, the degree of influence of each indicator on the performance of PCB manufacturers is analyzed, and which independent variables have better prediction power through the multiple regression model is achieved. The Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) analysis in Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) is applied to identify the ranking. The relative distance compared with the best manufacturer and the worst manufacturer is used to evaluate and rank the pros and cons of each ranking. VIKOR is then used to analyze ranking further. The results of data analysis have shown slightly different rankings based on TOPSIS and VIKOR. However, it seems the analysis of VIKOR is more accurate. The comparison of Taiwanese PCB manufacturers before and after the ranking is also revealed. Several practical directions for corporate planning or improvement are suggested. The link between ESG indicators and finance is observed not significant.