SingTel favors face-to-face contact over electronic communications
Ever more sophisticated telecoms technology is making it easier to live, work and play remotely. But the IR team at Singapore Telecommunications (SingTel) connects with shareholders the old-fashioned way – in person.
SingTel senior executives are on the road more than four weeks out of every year, traveling to the United States and Europe and touring regional financial hubs to meet with investors. To be sure, the company could put together elaborate conference calls and interactive closed-circuit presentations – and sometimes it does – but management prefers the human touch.
‘We do not yet harness technology the way many US companies do,’ explains Sin Yang Fong, director of IR at SingTel. ‘We don’t Twitter. In terms of reaching out with technology, we probably have a long way to go.’
Fully half of SingTel’s stock is owned by Temasek Holdings, the Singapore government’s investment arm. Although it does business primarily in Singapore and Australia, SingTel’s largest institutional investors are based in the US and UK. For this reason, Sin says her executives will often take to the skies rather than simply letting their fingers do the walking.
‘We would rather have quality contact and communications with investors,’ she says. ‘We don’t want to bombard them, we want to answer their questions and hear what they are thinking about.’
Getting the message out
CEO Chua Sock Koong spends at least a week in the US twice a year. She and other executives also make similar trips to Europe, to meet personally with the institutional investors and analysts who cover SingTel’s stock.
The company holds a conference every quarter. ‘It’s a very busy program, and at the end of the year [March 30] we’ve held some 300 meetings,’ says Sin. ‘That’s a lot of face time; we are lucky that we have strong endorsements from senior management.’
Sin acknowledges that her job is made significantly easier by Chua’s personal accessibility and enthusiasm for investors. Unusually among CEOs, Chua is herself an accountant, and one able to articulate a balance sheet in plain language and calm detail. After joining the company as treasurer in 1989, Chua rose to CFO and, in 2007, CEO.
‘My CEO is very shareholder and press-oriented,’ Sin says. ‘She insists on talking, and that reassures shareholders. The media, of course, loves it. She is totally aware of all the accounting developments and financial markets, which is very good for us because sometimes investors do get a bit more technical in the way they ask certain things.’
SingTel is unique among many large-cap peers for another reason: as much as 6 percent of its shares are owned by an army of retail investors, most of whom hold fewer than 2,000 shares of stock. This is a result of the Singaporean government’s 1993 IPO, the first of its kind. Pensioners were offered the opportunity to buy stock in the national phone provider, and tens of thousands took advantage. Temasek Holdings, the investment arm of the Singaporean government, still holds about 54 percent of SingTel stock.
‘I’ve not seen Temasek’s ownership being necessarily good or bad for SingTel,’ says Sin. ‘They’re professional investors and we treat them like any other buy-side investor.’
The phone is always ringing at SingTel’s IR department. The team, seven professionals split between offices in Singapore and Australia, fields occasional media requests and shareholder questions and advises senior management on material disclosure. In addition, the office monitors press and investment communities to make sure its message is clearly received. ‘We constantly brief execs on what the market doesn’t know or misunderstands,’ says Sin.
Media matters
Sin, who has managed the IR department since 2007, readily admits the media relations element of her brief is relatively easy – especially compared to the cutthroat reporting that surrounds, say, Apple’s release of the next-generation iPhone, or AT&T’s 3G troubles. ‘The financial media are a tamer bunch here,’ she says. ‘When it comes to corporate announcements – results, product launches, marketing campaigns and so on – they’ll cover it.’
Much of SingTel’s IR functions are handled in-house, but some of the technical demands are hived off to experts. Orient Capital of London does shareholder intelligence and research, and a division of Singapore-based multimedia conglomerate MediaCorp produces the company’s webcasts.
But at SingTel, the face-to-face contact is never outsourced. In addition to the company’s international meetings, presentations and business luncheons, institutional investors and influential analysts are invited to visit HQ once a year for an intensive meet-up with executives on their home turf and inside their primary market.
These ‘reverse roadshows’ are carefully engineered to pack as much information into the day as possible. Although participants are no longer allowed to play with prototype phones, neither are they subject to formal presentations.
‘They know us very well, so we prefer to just have Q&As to respond to their concerns,’ Sin says. The company books a hotel, blocks off a half-dozen meeting rooms and rotates the heads of finance, R&D and regional offices, along with other key executives, to brief the investors and analysts from the buy and sell sides.
It should be said that SingTel does, in fact, make some use of technology. The company eschews Twitter, preferring instead to concentrate on sending out meaty market analysis and material information, as well as communications mandated by Singapore Exchange. Conference calls with investors and analysts are transcribed and posted on SingTel.com, as are PowerPoint presentations that explain the company’s business, prospects and market overviews.
