The ICR Westwicke Blog is designed to deliver information and insights into the ever-changing world of healthcare communications.
Do you know how the investment community views your company, including your products, leadership team, business strategy, and financial performance? Asking the tough questions and opening your company up to potential negative feedback can be a scary prospect, but it’s well worth it. By conducting a perception audit — an independent investigation into investor and analyst impressions of a company — your company can realize the following benefits.
Securing media coverage can be a fantastic opportunity to tell your company’s story, boost your reputation, and exhibit credible thought leadership in your industry. However, delivering articulate quotes can be challenging.
The biotech market has been growing rapidly over the past two decades, and is expected to be worth nearly $2.5 trillion by 2028. Meanwhile, the pace of technological developments and innovation have reduced barriers to entry, leading to an influx of aspiring biotech startups eager to bring their products to market. But despite the increase in available capital, early-stage biotech companies are battling harder for their share of funding. In this article, we explore the challenges, strategies, and best practices in early-stage biotech funding.
Why would anyone invest in in a biotech or biopharma company? After all, most are development-stage companies based on complicated science that consume cash voraciously, have no revenue or earnings, and need to sell a dream that could be years away from commercialization.
The risks are enormous. Yet they attract investors because the payoff can be huge. Here are the 10 must-do items that all public biotech companies should address in an effective IR program in order to attract the right investors.
Just as schools and businesses run occasional fire drills, your company should periodically pressure test your crisis communications plan. To truly understand if and how the plan will work, your management team and employees need to see how your strategy will play out in a realistic scenario.
No matter how careful you are as a company, you can quickly find yourself in the center of a crisis you didn’t expect. When that crisis disrupts operations or threatens the reputation of the company, you must act swiftly but carefully.
Form 8-K, also known as an 8K, is a form that is filed by public companies to notify their shareholders and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) when an unscheduled material event takes place. In other words, it’s an announcement that a major event or corporate change that may be of interest to investors, has occurred. Form 8K is known as a “current report” and is filed in addition to an annual report on Form 10-K and a quarterly report on Form 10-Q.
There’s a saying in investor relations: “You date your investment bankers, but you marry your research analysts.” Essentially, this means that a sell side analyst who covers your company will remain your partner for the long run. Investment bankers, on the other hand, work with a long list of companies and deal with jam-packed, demanding schedules. They don’t disappear after the initial public offering (IPO), but the time they can devote to your company diminishes.
A well-planned and executed research and development (R&D) day can reinforce a company’s message, heighten a company’s visibility, and allow a management team to highlight their investment thesis. It can be an effective and efficient investor relations tool if done correctly.
Special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) activity has exploded in the past two years, from 59 transactions in 2019, to 248 deals in 2020, to 308 SPACs so far in 2021. However, SPACs are not new. This type of transaction has been around for decades, continually evolving as it rises and falls in popularity.
