In late 2016, Honeywell was facing questions from the Street about its aerospace business, which had performed worse than expected and was being eyed by an activist as a target for a spin-off. In response, the company last year hosted an analyst day at its hangar in New Jersey.
The efforts of the IR and management team earned the company the best investor meetings prize at the recent IR Magazine Awards – US 2018. We caught up with Mark Macaluso, vice president of investor relations at Honeywell, on the red carpet at the awards to discuss his approach to planning the analyst day.
‘We wanted to showcase some of the newer leaders in the business because a lot of guys had been there for a while and there were some fresh faces we wanted to get in front of investors,’ he explains. ‘We also have some new groundbreaking technology, which we think is high-speed internet connection within a plane. So we borrowed our Gulfstream G650 and did about four test flights with analysts, showing them what we see and explaining why we thought we have the best in breed of aero[space] technology.’
To measure the success of the analyst day, Macaluso says the IR team closely monitored what was written about the company afterwards and spoke to the company’s owners that attended the event.
‘We felt like we took control of the messaging again and the business is on solid footing had a tremendous finish to 2017 and is off to a roaring start this year,’ Macaluso says. ‘Things have turned around. We’re really happy with what we did, happy with when we did the event and the feedback was just tremendous.’
Click here to view the video interview with Honeywell’s Mark Macaluso.
