The Westwicke Blog is designed to deliver information and insights into the ever-changing world of healthcare communications.
To execute a successful non-deal road show, you must put in the planning and work. It’s critical to pinpoint the right city and sponsoring analyst to make the most of your trip. However, that work and coordination is well worth it. By getting on the road and telling your story to the Street, you’ll experience many benefits. Here are what we consider the top 10 benefits of non-deal road shows.
As the year comes to a close, it’s time for management teams to start thinking about their 2019 investor relations strategies. How can you learn from your efforts in 2018 — and what needs to change for the year ahead? Should you shift the focus of your activities or hold steady on the path toward the goals you outlined for the past year?
Here, our team of IR experts at Westwicke provide their best advice for creating a top-notch investor relations plan that aligns with your company’s goals and priorities for the upcoming year.
At-the-market (ATM) offerings, a tool early-stage companies have used for years to quickly raise capital, have grown increasingly common among healthcare players, with biotech firms in particular embracing this funding method.
ATM financing provides young, publicly traded companies with a relatively agile, low-key, low-hassle, lower-cost way to sell newly issued shares to finance growth — without the need to stage a road show or even announce the sale. This works well for businesses like biotech firms that need to fund R&D and general operations before their products have received government approval for commercial sale.
The J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference provides an insightful beginning to the year. Beyond offering an opportunity to meet with analysts, investors, and other professionals in the healthcare industry, it illuminates trends that you’re likely to see throughout the upcoming year.
As you look forward to the 2019 event in January, start thinking about the information you can glean from the sessions you’ll attend, meetings you’ll facilitate, and announcements you’ll hear over the course of the conference.
Some management teams assume — incorrectly — that they can play it safe by withholding financial guidance, believing they can’t miss estimates they don’t provide. To the contrary, companies may inadvertently limit their Street credibility by opting out of earnings forecasts and, at the same time, miss an opportunity to manage investor expectations.
Investors judge financial results against analysts’ consensus estimates even if a company doesn’t provide projection, so it makes sense for leadership to set expectations themselves and provide some guardrails. Perhaps more importantly, formal guidance signals management’s confidence in the company’s growth and stability.
At a “banker bake-off,” you have the opportunity to compare investment banks and learn how they position themselves. One bank may talk about its relationships with the buy-side accounts, while another will highlight its track record for successfully getting private companies public.
After hearing that information, how do you make your final decision? Here are five primary areas to focus on to help you select the right banking team.
Congratulations! You have spent the past 12 months — or possibly longer — building relationships with the Street, including investors, bankers, and sell-side analysts. You refined your presentation deck; drafted the S-1 after spending hours in a room with your attorneys, accountants, and management team; and brought your website and its content up to the caliber of a company that expects to be public soon. You engaged with the buy side during test-the-waters (TTW) meetings and, finally, your confidentially filed S-1 has flipped public.
However, U.S. Securities and Exchange (SEC) regulations require that you wait 15 days before the road show begins — so what do you do now?
Wall Street analysts can play a key role in a company’s investor relations plan, so executives should approach these relationships carefully. Properly handled analyst relationships can become a significant asset to a company, while missteps may create unnecessary problems — especially considering that analysts may share anything you say with the public markets.
In April 2018, the Hong Kong Exchange announced a change to its listing rules to allow (among other things) biotechnology companies with no revenue to list on the bourse. The move came as Hong Kong sought to establish itself as a financing hub for pre-revenue companies, in the face of fierce competition from the Chinese mainland and Singapore, exchanges from which had been aggressively wooing companies with fast-growing earnings.
In conjunction with your company’s initial public offering (IPO), your two-week road show will take you across the country and put you in front of hundreds of potential investors. To prepare you for the trip, your bankers will make sure you know the ins and outs of your “story.” However, to make your meetings successful, you’ll want to be aware of a few more tips for success. Here are 10 things you should keep in mind during those IPO road show meetings.
