China Aviation Oil (Singapore) scooped the people’s choice award for investor relations at the IR Magazine Global Forum & Awards in Amsterdam.
The firm, headquartered in Singapore, secured the award for its multi-pronged approach to investor relations adopted over a four-year period. This includes its holistic approach to IR, as well as a proactive outreach program and a retail and institutional IR strategy that saw the chief administrative officer present at nine SGX retail investor forums.
Kok Hoong Khong, deputy general manager at China Aviation Oil in Europe, accepted the award on behalf of the firm.
‘A lot of people talk about Chinese companies not being very transparent with investors, but my guys have done a great job. Our numbers have grown a lot, our investor base has increased. It’s really all been down to my small but dedicated team,’ he says.
The company also received more than 400 investor engagements via its self-organized corporate access day and annual general meetings.
Last year’s inaugural people’s choice award went Paris-headquartered nanomedicine company Nanobiotix.
The other companies short-listed in this category were:
Akamai Technologies (US) – for its handling of a large-scale activism campaign by Elliott Management and its creative and informative messaging on challenges in the business and articulation of the future direction of the company.
EDAG Engineering Group (Germany) – for successfully managing turbulent times involving profit warnings and management changes after its IPO at the end of 2015 and building up transparent communications with market participants.
H&H International Holdings (China) – for rebuilding its IR platform over the past two years to have a much clearer structure, leading the company’s IR function to evolve from a contact point for investors to a more strategic role facilitating effective communications between the company and the financial community.
Linde (Germany) – for using a combination of IR, PR, analytics and psychology to navigate complex German takeover rules that resulted in Linde’s IR function achieving an extraordinarily high level of success in one of the largest deals (more than $80 bn) in German M&A history.
