Türk Telekom makes great effort to maintain frequent contact with the investment community. Major tools include financial releases, an updated website, investor calls, social media and one-on-one meetings – just like at many other companies. Of these tools, however, roadshows are particularly important for us so we conduct a thorough review twice a year when designing our roadshow schedules. This analysis includes deciding destinations, timings and the level of senior management participation, along with investor targeting.
In Turkey, major blue-chip companies meet a large portion of their investor base at conferences. We attend about 25 conferences annually, mostly in the UK and the US, and meet more than 250 investors. But our most recent shareholder base study indicates that although our top shareholders are from the US and the UK, we have more than 200 institutional investors from all around the world, 127 of which are from regions other than the US and the UK. As a result, we need to make sure we visit these other countries with roadshows.
Once we have chosen the destination, we analyze our current shareholder base and potential investors in that location. We prioritize the investor base during our analysis, and investors that have made significant moves in their positions (buying or selling) are mainly at the top of the list. During the analysis, we do not only take historical Türk Telekom positions into account but also other positions in our peers or in other Turkish companies. This is important in order to understand whether the buying/selling activity is specific to us or related to our sector or country.
If investors change their positions significantly in our shares but keep their positions on hold in our peers and/or other local companies, we analyze our meeting frequency with those investors. The decision to reduce a holding in a company can sometimes be due to inadequate interaction. Alternatively, further support might be helpful to increase the buying spree in the stock. We particularly arrange meetings with these buying and selling investors to provide them with the most updated information. On the other hand, we obviously aim to retain our current shareholder base and keep track of potential investors, so we also look again at our meeting frequency with current shareholders to make sure they have all received updated information about the company via recent meetings or interactions. If we think it has been a long time since we met, we ask for a meeting with those shareholders.
During roadshow preparation, the recommendations of brokerage houses are crucial because they have daily contact with the investment community. We expect the brokerage houses to propose the most efficient meeting schedule with investors showing the highest interest in our company, which serves to create a diversified shareholder base in different countries and helps to extend our reach. The choice of broker depends on the destination: some are better than others when it comes to particular destinations, depending on the broker’s headquarters and the strength of its presence. The broker’s service quality in logistics and scheduling are important, too.
We maximize senior management participation in roadshows as much as we can. Having decided the country and brokerage house and analyzed investor potential, we check the timetable of our senior management team. In 2014 we attended 18 roadshows, 15 of them with senior management members in tow – 10 of these involved the chief executive.
Before we start the roadshow, we have a good knowledge of institutions that will be attending. We prepare profiles of them according to their size, type of funds, investment style, existing holdings and understanding of our firm. We usually prefer to keep our meetings to a maximum of five or six per day during these roadshows. We note all the questions we receive from investors for future reference. Separately, we also ask broker partners to gather feedback from attending institutions. Understanding the impression we leave behind and making sure our message gets through to investors are crucial factors for evaluating the success of our work – and for helping to plan the next trip.
Sule Gençtürk and Nergis Gündogdu are part of the investor relations team at Türk Telekom
