This year’s DIRK conference – the 15th such event – was held as usual in the Frankfurt Marriott. It took place at the beginning of the first week of June, which meant it coincided with the Queen’s Jubilee in the UK. Perhaps that was the reason so few Brits were in evidence this time; the Americans’ excuse was that the NIRI conference was on at the same time. (Note to IR conference organizers: please think of the globetrotters in your potential audience and maybe try to avoid having all your events on the same date in future.)
Nevertheless, well over 500 delegates were registered for the two-day German event, to which Magdalena Moll, DIRK’s president and head of IR at award-winning German chemicals company BASF, welcomed them in a stirring opening address. Moll’s CEO followed with a keynote speech.
There followed a wide range of breakout sessions but this writer’s options were limited by the poverty of her German language skills. A noble attempt to enjoy a session about roadshows by Porsche Automobil’s Frank Gaube ended in dismay as I sat surrounded by an attentive group that clearly found his presentation both insightful and entertaining.
He was talking about the crucial requirement for planning such events in meticulous detail, a serious topic that nevertheless generated absorbed interest and even laughter among all who could understand it.
Apart from this one, then, I stuck to English language or simultaneously translated sessions, which covered a wide range of topics. One such was by Paul Scott from Brunswick whose subject was ‘Active investing: how investor engagement is changing, and what this means for IROs’.
Among other things, Scott talked about the distribution of trading between dark and lit venues and offered some key recommendations for IROs. First, he stressed the need to get to grips with the complexity of today’s trading environment. Second, he urged IROs to be sure they knew about the specifics of their own companies: from their trading patterns to their trading venues to their shareholder databases to the activists interested in them.
Scott also encouraged IROs to focus on the long term in their IR activities, particularly if that’s what they’d like the markets to focus on. He suggested moving away from quarterly guidance, for instance, and refraining from detailed quarterly reporting.
Praise was offered by the less linguistically challenged delegates for many other sessions, including one by Ernst & Young on IFRS in capital markets communication; another on investor targeting involving Ipreo and Stephan Eger from Deutsche Telekom; and a briefing for CFOs by Dr Olaf Streuer of HCI Capital.
The gala awards dinner on the first night benefited from Kiran Bhojani’s involvement as MC – a new role for the IRO-turned-consultant, but one he was clearly brought into this world to perform. It might have been a bad move: will he ever be able to return to the hum-drum showbiz-lite world of straight investor relations?
