Advice on all you need to know
Q. We are headquartered in Europe and listed on the stock exchange of one of the smaller European Union countries. Until recently our major institutional shareholders were all local, but as we have grown many professional investors from abroad have bought in. How can I identify who they are and find out more about them?
A.Capital markets intelligence is now a required part of everyday investor relations life. No longer can you rely on your investment bank advisors to keep you up-to-date with who is buying your stock and when. Apart from anything else, they run the risk of alienating their fund manager clients if they disclose the details of individual dealings.
The professional investment community is an international and increasingly complex one and the investment required to track its multiple facets is considerable. In practice, independent capital markets intelligence is worth paying for and there are several vendors to choose from. Before contacting any of them, draw up your wish list of information you would like to have and then ask each one to demonstrate how they would supply it and what it would cost.
Q. Sell-side analysts covering our company always send me copies of their work. What really interests me is what they write about our peers. How can I persuade them to send me copies of those reports?
A. It is very important to keep a watching brief on how the market perceives your sector and your peers as well as your company. So having access to all research written is crucial. Equally, access to historical research is important, so you can look back to when other companies in the sector restructured, undertook share buy-backs or undertook other corporate activities that your own company might be considering. Both Thomson Financial's First Call (www.firstcall.com) and Multex.com (www.multex.com) provide comprehensive investment research libraries with advanced search capabilities via subscription. In addition, sites such as FT.com have useful sector information. Finally, just ask your analysts to put you on their mailing lists for the whole sector. They should happily oblige, and if they don't then just have a quiet word with their corporate finance department!
Q. Much to my annoyance my boss won't approve the budget for me to have a Reuters or Bloomberg screen on my desk. He has one and says that should be good enough for the whole department. But it's on his desk in his office and when he has meetings or is out and has locked the door we can't use it.
A. First, how many such screens do you have in the whole company? If the finance department has a few as well it may not cost much money to extend the licence. Call up the supplier and see what the real cost will be.
In the meantime, make a point of offering to do numerous sector briefings and a regular market report for senior management. Then write a schedule with clear deadlines marked in red for the completion dates of the report and put it in a prominent place on your desk. Finally, either constantly interrupt your boss in his meetings, or make a point of being absent all the time in the nearest library or in another department accessing the data, blaming the report writing and lack of convenient data access for your constant absence.
You should soon get your screen, and once again prove that IR is an increasingly strategic role.
E-mail questions to Heather McGregor - advice@irmag.com. McGregor is a former IRO and investment analyst who currently works on IR assignments for Taylor:Bennett, an executive search firm specializing in communications jobs