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.
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.
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.
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.
Unlike quiet periods following an IPO, which are closely regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), end-of-quarter quiet periods are more loosely defined and not strictly regulated.
Right after you report earnings is the ideal time to get out on the road and tell your story to the Street. Sell-side analysts are incentivized to market with management teams, so they are always willing to sponsor a non-deal road show (NDRS).
In 2018, we wrote a piece on best practices to manage and communicate with the growing retail investor community. While the basic tenants of those recommendations hold today, the retail investor has fundamentally changed over the last couple of years.
One of our clients, a recently public diagnostics company, settled an ongoing royalty dispute with a major pharmaceutical company. The settlement amount was significantly lower than what our client had accrued, resulting in nearly $750 thousand upside to their P&L in the upcoming quarter.
No one would argue that 2020 was unique and challenging for almost every industry, including healthcare. The year forced both public and private companies to reconsider many aspects of how they do business and communicate with the investment community. As we all adapted and learned, our Westwicke blog covered a variety of investor relations topics, both pandemic related and not. Below are some of the most popular blog posts we published this year.
Warren Buffet makes the news each year for his letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. By employing his uniquely wry and contrarian style and covering many topics that have little direct bearing on Berkshire’s results or prospects, Buffet has taken one of the staple obligations of a public company CEO, and turned it into something much larger — a kind of State of the Union from the desk of one of our most important business leaders.
