Best use of multimedia for IR: Why Valmet won

‘Investor communications needs to respond to today’s demands for information sharing,’ says Calle Loikkanen, director of investor relations at Valmet. ‘People want to have easy access to information and they are not willing to invest much time in it.’

Despite having its roots in the 18th century, Valmet merged with another firm in 1999; that company – Metso – split in 2013. As such, Valmet is a relatively new company, which also has an impact on the firm’s approach to IR. 

‘As a new company, Valmet needs to be very active in investor relations, and proactivity is one of the central values of Valmet’s IR team,’ explains Loikkanen. 

So despite the three-strong team having no previous experience in video production, Valmet decided to launch an IR video gallery, doing production in-house, including script writing, voice recording, filming, animation, editing and publishing. 

‘This ensures a very lean and efficient way of getting things done,’ says Loikkanen. For example, ‘a site visit summary video can at best be published the following day’. Only capital markets day webcasts and AGM videos are produced externally.

The gallery, which is also available on YouTube, is focused on investor interests, with four key criteria:

1. The videos have to be short: two to five minutes long
2. The videos have to be educational/descriptive
3. The process of making the videos has to be quick, efficient and lean 
4. Making the videos has to be cost-efficient.

While there was, of course, an initial time investment in learning how to produce the videos in-house, Loikkanen says this certainly paid off. The gallery, launched mid-2015, held around 20 videos at the time of Valmet’s self-nomination to the IR Magazine Awards. It caters to Finnish and English audiences and ‘serves as a more visual way to learn about Valmet, its businesses and operations, the investment highlights as well as shareholder structure’. 

The original aim was to make use of video and animation in investor communications, says Loikkanen, and ‘to share information from different kinds of investor events (such as site visits) equally with all market participants.’

Talking about some of the most popular videos to date, Loikkanen notes that site videos are particularly popular. Taking the top spot is a highlight video from a site visit to Jyväskylä, which has more than 1,600 views, followed by summary videos of site visits to Sundsvall and Tampere with more than 1,200 views each. ‘The investment highlight video with 2015 full-year results has been watched close to 1,000 times,’ Loikkanen adds, while ‘our most popular three-minute quarterly results video has been watched nearly 800 times.’ 

Three of the awards judges ranked Valmet as their number one choice for the best use of multimedia for IR. ‘I liked their videos immensely,’ commented Abigail Herron, head of responsible investment engagement at Aviva Investors.