The first impression counts and the role of the IR specialist becomes more and more important, crucial for medium and long term, the time of the management being increasingly limited. Investors need detailed information about the company, both qualitative and quantitative, data that the IR professional must know very well.
The IR professional is the one who can provide basic information about the company, the description of the company’s products and services, the financial statements, the financial statistics, the medium and long-term company development strategy, as well as an overview of the organizational structure of the company. The final decision of the professional investor, especially the international one, takes place, on average, after two to five meetings with the top management of the company, according to an analysis of Rivel Research conducted among investors around the world.
Ana-Maria Imbrea, Director of Investor Relations and Corporate Relations, ALRO, and Marius Dan, Deputy General Manager, Corporate Strategy, Fondul Proprietatea, detailed how they prepare for meetings with investors and what information they are preparing at company level to meet investors’ expectations.
Ana-Maria Imbrea, Director of Investor Relations and Corporate Relations, ALRO:
“We have a detailed presentation for meetings, a document that is also available on the company’s website. In terms of preparing the process, as an IR professional, I discuss first internally, with colleagues about the latest news in the company and at market level. As a team, we analyze the profile of the people with whom we are going to have a meeting and then we are preparing a brief in order to target the interest of those people accordingly. There have been situations when we met at the same time both new people and people who knew us very well. In those cases, indeed, the challenge is greater to be able to maintain their interest. It is important to talk to and adapt your speech to the profile of the people who are present, so that it is a win-win on both sides because time is limited.”
Marius Dan, Deputy General Manager, Corporate Strategy, Fondul Proprietatea:
“For the meetings that us, Fondul Proprietatea, have with actual and potential investors, the presentation is very important, because it contains a lot of synthesized public information about Fondul Proprietatea, about the companies in the portfolio, as well as a macro part. In the first five years as listed company, we received a lot of questions related to Romania’s macroeconomic fundamentals. Meanwhile, access to macro data provided by relevant institutions has improved and the IR activity of other listed companies has intensified, and this is beneficial for investors to understand what is happening at the macro and micro level. Our IR presentation has over 100 slides and are updated monthly. Before the meetings, we have a training session where we discuss at team level the most frequently asked questions received from investors lately. We talk a lot with investors, we have somewhere around six – seven discussions per week. This proactive approach allows us to know what are the most important topics for investors and we try to address these aspects in meetings with other investors who already know the company’s story. For those who don’t know, we go through all the slides, through the whole story, from the industry, business model, portfolio, team, to strategy.”
Measuring the effectiveness of good communication with investors is difficult, because it translates into the valuation of the company, the money attracted, the reputation of the company and in the interest of investors to trade the company’s shares. Investors’ expectations are high related to a company communication approach, penalizing the lack of transparency.