Remove obstacles to investing in your stock, say think tank participants
It’s our turn to be on the road here at IR Impact. Right now we are at the mid-point of a global tour with seven events taking place across four countries in five weeks.
We started off in London with our AI & Tech Forum, before landing in San Francisco last week for our West Coast think tank.
This week it’s the turn of our East Coast think tank and US Awards before we move on to Canada and Amsterdam for the final legs of the trip.
The best part of all this is we get to catch up with lots of you wonderful people, find out how you are doing and hear how your IR work is evolving.
It’s certainly a wild time to be an IRO. While uncertainty is always present in the market, companies are dealing with major surprises far more frequently at the moment.
On any day, corporate strategies and financial guidance could be thrown into doubt by a policy announcement, geopolitical shift or another factor.
Much of that uncertainty, of course, stems from the US administration – who, by the way, could clearly learn something from IR about how to keep sensitive information under wraps. You won’t find many IR teams discussing their upcoming earnings on Signal.
But getting back on track, one of the top talking points across our events is how to communicate with, and stay close to, investors amid all this change.
During our events, IR professionals have discussed areas like managing guidance updates, providing more detail on funding and currency exposure, how to respond to more scrutiny on ESG and many other areas.
While each company, sector and region will have its own idiosyncrasies, one common piece of advice has been to try to keep your message as simple and consistent as possible.
As we heard at our West Coast event last week, buy-side analysts get tossed a lot of names to look at. If they come across an obstacle to their research, they will quickly discard that option and move on to the next.
Another point made was that companies that regularly change their disclosure, including lots of one-offs or tweaking of metrics, can be a major turn off for the buy side. Amid all the noise and uncertainty, IR’s role is to offer as clear a view as possible of the future.
How are you adapting communications in the current environment? Get in touch and let us know at [email protected] or on LinkedIn.
