Investor Relations
It appears that a number of New Zealand NZX listed companies do not put much importance on investor relations. Investor relations encompass the communication between the company and its shareholders. Some of this communication is mandatory such as the audited financial statements that are required by statute (e.g. Companies Act 1993 and Financial Reporting Act 1993) as well as the NZX listing rules. Companies also provide additional communication since it is recognised that the current and future share-holders are the providers of capital. Providing additional information can build confidence with the capital markets and reduce the cost of capital. Therefore most NZX companies also publish their annual reports and additional market information on an ‘Investor Relations’ part of their web-site.
Earlier this year I acquired shares in Restaurant Brands, an NZX listed company that is the franchisee of KFC, Starbucks, and Pizza Hut in New Zealand. Being a simple cash-flow company, I wanted to do an in-depth free-cash-flow analysis, so wanted to get a copy of their annual reports for the past 10 years. However, going to their web-site I found a number of broken links for their older annual reports. I brought this to the attention of their investor relations personnel who discovered that at some point these annual reports were inadvertently removed from their web-site. Unfortunately they couldn’t find any electronic copies of these annual reports and they kindly sent me some hard-copies from their archives.
Restaurant Brands informed me that they were going to continue to look for electronic copies of the missing reports and that they will restore the web-site. To help them identify the broken links on their site, I set up LinkTiger which can be configured to crawl a web-site at regular intervals to discover broken links. I provided Restaurant Brands with the list of broken links that LinkTiger discovered. However I have continued to receive weekly LinkTiger reports over the past two months that the same links are still broken. Does anyone have a copy of the electronic copies of their annual reports? If so, can you help Restaurant Brands out by forwarding them to their investor personnel!
I came across another example of this a few weeks ago with another small NZX listed company: Burger-Fuel. I do not own any shares in this company, but a few weeks ago I was interested to see how its sales were doing given the recession. I went to their web-site and tried to access their latest half-year report and the broken link directed me to the following humorous message:
Sorry, there seems to have been a glitch in the matrix and this link is currently unavailable. Please contact your network administrator, BurgerFuel or your local GP if pain persists.
I like the humour in their error message, but I’ve just checked back and it appears that the glitch in their matrix persists.
These problems raise an interesting question. Does anyone else actually read the annual reports from these companies? Am I the only person who has noticed these broken links? In conclusion, I wonder if these companies place much importance on investor relations?
2 Comments
Other links to this post
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
By Greg Day, April 28, 2009 @ 2:42 pm
My guess is that the annual reports are not followed closely. Ive found it very educational looking through annual reports, and how to find out anything of interest you generally have to look through the notes to the financials. Im pretty sure a small proportion of shareholders would bother to get to the notes to financials, you have to be a super geek to do that!
Recently getting Infratil annual reports, I had to go in person to their head office where someone ran around finding various copies… it obviously isnt a common request.
You would think that companies have a fundamental responsibility to publish and keep up-to-date these links. If Infratil had done it, I would have just downloaded everything.
[Reply]
By Kelvin Hartnall, April 28, 2009 @ 9:24 pm
Thanks Greg, Infratil appears to be another NZ company where the older annual reports are not available on their web-site. Going to Infratil’s web-site I can download their latest 2008 annual report, but cannot access the annual reports for 2007 or before.
I think we need a shame-list for NZ public companies; if you cannot access the last 5 years of annual reports and interim reports, whether due to broken links or a management that doesn’t make them available, then they belong on the list.
[Reply]