Information is the life blood of markets: Managements speak directly to institutional investors, portals distribute company data, equities research is pushed directly to professional investors and stock exchanges disseminate corporate announcements.
From an IR perspective is this all that is required?
Not in Africa.
Prima facie it looks like the above is sufficient. At least from a disclosure and regulatory perspective but consider this:-
- the majority of stock exchanges in Africa are unable to ensure that printed regulatory releases appearing in the press appear simultaneously on the web. Read my top 10 suggestions to African stock exchanges.
- the majority of management disclosures to institutional investors probably are not released simultaneously on other fora.
- corporate, stock exchange and portals of information are generally incomplete with no formalized assurance of timely disclosure.
To investors unfamiliar with African markets offering comprehensive investment data in a timely fashion is by far the greatest challenge. No-one has achieved this successfully. It’s up to the listed companies. They are the prime source of information. Bringing this information to market is what AIC is about but our services can be mistakenly be seen to address only the retail investor sectors given the processes I outlined at the beginning of this blog.
Yes we are proponents of broad shareholder engagement but the core of what we do is assist Boards satisfy their basic investor relations obligations at high impact for low cost. This is our African IR solution. It’s comprehensive and well balanced.
Yes our automated communication module of InvestorPass™ acts perfectly as a retail shareholder tool: low cost, automation and low investment in management time. But for us the key offering is the ability to consolidate all of the disclosure practices into a single well rounded tool that ensures that management do not have anything to worry about. Oh, and that it pays for itself.