Strategic ESG Priorities and Materiality Assessments: Evidence from Hong Kong Listed Fashion and Textile Firms

Firms increasingly rely on ESG materiality assessments to prioritise sustainability issues under heightened stakeholder scrutiny. Yet the strategic consequences of materiality beyond firm-level disclosure remain underexplored. This study examines how materiality assessments shape ESG prioritisation at the industry level using sustainability disclosures from 44 Hong Kong–listed fashion and textile firms. Applying a standardised ESG taxonomy and percentile-based normalisation, we aggregate firm-level materiality matrices into a comparable sector benchmark. The findings reveal systematic convergence around a narrow set of social issues, particularly supply chain and labour-related topics, alongside weaker and more dispersed prioritisation of environmental and governance concerns. Although internal and stakeholder assessments are moderately aligned, environmental challenges occupy less prominent positions in the aggregated matrix. These results suggest that materiality assessments function as sector-level attention-structuring mechanisms that stabilise governable risks while constraining the strategic visibility of diffuse environmental impacts.