Provide analyst estimates for a level playing field
December 3, 2007
Are you sharing information with your retail investors as well as your professional ones?
Institutional investors should already know the market expectations, but providing analyst estimates on your website enables retail shareholders to consider their options with the same information to hand. Surprisingly, this isn’t done on many corporate sites, though the numbers are increasing. Examples of those that do provide such forecasts are Prudential, Carphone Warehouse and Petrobras. All provide a variety of different measures.
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But why not go a step further, and provide an automated feed of broker forecast information? This would mean that your investors can have the latest information very easily - and don’t have to keep returning to your site.
RWE does this very neatly: they provide broker forecast information on their site in some detail, and have archives going back to 2003. If requested, they will email the latest information out to you every 2-3 weeks.
I think that is a great service.
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Site Review: ArcelorMittal’s TV channel
November 21, 2007
ArcelorMittal are doing a great job of communication over at Creating History.
This site is dedicated to the merger of Arcelor and Mittal, and consists of:
- excellent video materials - 15 so far, posted intermittently over several months, covering a range of topics associated with the merger
- a blog - which appears to have been updated on a very regular basis (looks like 5 times a week, which as we know, is very intensive)
- RSS feed and podcasts
- a section for ‘ask the CEO’ - in which Lakshmi Mittal will personally answer questions. This does look a bit outdated, and really should be removed if the answers won’t be forthcoming - or else they should be answered
- a press area, including third party coverage - again, this doesn’t seem to have been updated recently
- an About section.
Blog review: Dell’s IR blog
November 9, 2007
As I’m sure you know by now, Dell launched the first Investor Relations blog just over a week ago, to quite a bit of comment around the patch, and they’ve got a couple of posts up now.
This blog is a really very interesting addition to the IR site, and Dell are typically brave to be the first (though I suppose someone has to!). I’m sure it won’t be long before other companies join them … Read more
8 ways of charting your share price (or not)
November 5, 2007
Ever wondered what everyone else was using to chart their share price? Here are eight different ways of charting the share price.
Many if not most FTSE 100 companies now provide interactive share charting facilities, so that visitors can see the trend over the last day, week, month … or whatever period interests them.
Some companies provide the option to compare the performance of their stock with indices and sector - perhaps the FTSE or equivalent, or a set of related companies.
A subset of these companies make it easy to compare their own performance with that of their direct competition. For example, Roche make it easy to see how they are doing compared to Bayer, or Pfizer, GSK or AstraZeneca (among several others).
A very few companies make it easy to compare their performance against apparently any listed company. Read more
An easy way to involve your retail investors
October 26, 2007
While researching for a benchmark report into oil and gas companies this week, I came across this example of a great way of communicating with your retail investors.
Petrobras run a live chat session with their Individual Investor Manager, and then post the transcript of the session for future reference, with an archive going back to 2001. Most of these sessions deal with the quarterly results, but some cover the business plans and strategy.
Yes, these are all in Portuguese, but what a great idea! Individual investors can raise questions and have them answered, in public. Petrobras enhances its reputation for being open and accessible to all.
You would need to publicise a forthcoming chat session clearly, probably from the home page, and possibly even emailing any retail investors for whom you had contact information. Petrobras flag it up on the landing page for Investors.
This is worth thinking about - especially if your retail investors are feeling ignored in favour of the professionals.