The ICR Westwicke Blog is designed to deliver information and insights into the ever-changing world of healthcare communications.
Shareholders, investors, and analysts all have a unique set expectations and a well-thought-out investor relations strategy can help you balance these demands. Executing a successful strategy is essential to your company’s appeal and can help build credibility with Wall Street. We’ve compiled a list of the top 10 things you can do to drive your investor relations strategy and keep investors engaged in your company’s story.
One of the perennial issues during earnings season is setting a date for your quarterly financial release that doesn’t clash with a dozen or so of your peers. By choosing a date that’s too crowded, investor and analyst participation may be low. The same problem can happen when choosing a date for an R&D day or investor day. So how do you go about choosing a date for your event that doesn’t clash with everyone else’s?
The answer is you don’t. Or rather, you shouldn’t waste your time thinking too much about it. First, I’ll talk a little about why you shouldn’t overthink the matter, then I’ll address what you can do to combat low live participation on your call or at your event.
According to a report by Moody’s Investors Service earlier this year, passive investments account for 28.5% of assets under management in the U.S., a figure expected to exceed 50% in the next four to seven years.
What’s the driving force behind this passive investing trend? Passive funds – including ETFs, index funds, and quant funds – often have lower fees and superior performance over many actively managed, and more expensive, mutual funds. Passive investments may track indexes, such as the S&P 500, or be driven by computer-based models.
We recently hosted a luncheon for biotech execs where our special guest speaker was Ed Baxter, senior managing director of Evercore’s corporate advisory business, focused on life sciences and healthcare. Ed has broad experience in biotech and life sciences investment banking and M&A at a variety of firms from boutiques to bulge brackets. Here are his key thoughts and takeaways on raising capital for the sector and where it may be headed.
Whether it’s your first J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference or your 36th, if you are involved in the healthcare sector in any way, you know J.P. Morgan is the super bowl of healthcare conferences and for four days, it becomes the epicenter of healthcare. The attendance is staggering with approximately 20,000 healthcare professionals ranging from institutional investors, private equity and venture capital investors, bankers, analysts, and company executives all gathering to see the next new thing in healthcare. It is the place to be for healthcare executives to start the year.
Attending Wall Street investment banking conferences is a large part of a strategic investor relations plan. Along with non-deal road shows, management’s visibility and interaction with buy-side accounts during one-on-one meetings are critical for conveying your story to potential investors, addressing unanswered questions, and expanding on an investment theme. But, finding the appropriate conference strategy can be harder than it seems, especially when it comes to lining up a successful meeting schedule with key buy-side accounts.
You are an executive at a development-stage life sciences company. You have just been through the intense and grueling process of completing your initial public offering. Congratulations. You must now look towards executing a strategic investor relations plan. Quickly, you are faced with a significant decision: Should our company host quarterly conference calls?
Ultimately, there are pros and cons associated with both options.
The story of development-stage biotech companies is one of continuous fundraising. Not until approved products generate enough revenue to ensure a degree of self-sufficiency can you take a break from raising capital.
This process can take many years and many companies won’t make it. Either they’ll be acquired along the way or their product will fail one or more clinical trials.
Not long ago I was surprised to discover that a client of mine that had recently completed a rebranding effort had sent out some messaging to investors under its former name. It turns out that the company was still using its old name with some audiences.
In this case, the company had good reasons to hold onto the benefits of its old brand, so it retained it as a subsidiary to its newly named parent company. And that’s not unusual. Many well-known brands or and products are owned by corporate parents you’ve never heard of (just as many well-known corporations have low-profile subsidiaries or product lines).
MiFID II is a term you are bound to hear more often over the second half of 2017. It is the European Union’s Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II, a financial services regulation in the EU that will unbundle broker/dealer research and corporate access services from execution services. It is scheduled to become effective on January 3, 2018.
As an executive of an American public healthcare company, you might be asking yourself why you need to be aware of a European regulation. The answer: Because many major institutions operate on a global basis, the impact, while initially centered in Europe, will ultimately be felt in all corners of the global financial markets.
