Reed Nolte has been promoted to vice president of investor relations at Viacom Inc in New York, one of the world’s largest entertainment and publishing companies and a leading force in most segments of the international media marketplace. Viacom operations include Blockbuster, MTV Networks, the Paramount companies, Showtime Networks, Simon & Schuster and Viacom Interactive Media, as well as cable systems, radio and television stations, and movie screens in eleven countries.
As vice president, Nolte will be Viacom’s primary liaison with stock analysts and institutional investors, with overall responsibility for managing the company’s communications programmes with them and for developing financial presentations to the company’s other external audiences.
Nolte originally joined Viacom last year, after its takeover of his previous employer, Paramount Communications. By then he had been with Paramount for some five years, working in the treasury department as assistant treasurer and director, banking operations. His responsibilities there included management of a range of treasury functions, including retirement plan asset management, foreign currency exposure management, and financing foreign operations.
‘Before the takeover of Paramount, investor relations at Viacom was handled by the treasurer,’ explains Nolte. ‘And at Viacom the IR person was Marty Shea {who recently left Edelman Financial in New York to rejoin Triarc Companies, see page 65}. But when the companies merged, it was felt that there should be more IR staffing to handle the investment community and that the treasurer would need help.’
So Nolte was named assistant treasurer, investor relations. As such, he had something of a baptism of fire: Viacom had just bought Paramount but the Blockbuster deal was still pending. ‘I remember my first IR assignment was to put together a roadshow presentation to describe what the new company was about – or what it would be, assuming we bought Blockbuster,’ recalls Nolte. ‘It was a very busy period.’
That was all going on in the summer of 1994, since when the treasurer, in Nolte’s words, ‘has been doing less IR, more treasury’.
So the promotion of Nolte now to vice president reflects the status quo rather than any dramatic change in IR functions. He will continue to focus mainly on the large institutional investors and the institutional analysts, as before, while his staff will go on handling administrative aspects of IR, working with trustee banks, arranging the annual meeting and so on.
Those staff also manage the company’s relationships with retail shareholders, who have become a more significant constituency in the overall shareholder base since the takeovers of last year. ‘We’ve become much more of a retail stock since then,’ notes Nolte. Indeed, in the past Viacom itself had only a small retail holding, but there were a fair number of individual stockholders in Paramount, and a lot in Blockbuster. As Viacom’s IR person, now Nolte has to consider the implications of this shift in stockholder profile. ‘For instance, Viacom has not produced an annual report since 1987, mainly because of the expense but also because it’s not very important to institutions,’ says Nolte. ‘But we are now considering changing that policy, to meet the different needs of retail shareholders.’
