Global Top 10: Intel on in-depth analyst days

Global Top 50 winner: best IRO, Mark Henninger

Global Top 50 rank: 6

US Top 100 rank in 2015: 2

IR Magazine Awards won in 2015: 2

IR team size: 6

Talking about some of the things that make Intel’s IR program unique, head of IR Mark Henninger explains that the team places a heavy emphasis on business acumen and discipline – an approach that is also applied to communications. Information is made easy to get to, callbacks happen quickly and commitments to follow up are kept, he adds. But that doesn’t mean the team isn’t open to new ideas.

‘Much of our communication is focused on a corporate-level narrative that cuts across multiple lines of business,’ Henninger says. ‘This past year, we’ve experimented with events that explore a single line of business in-depth in an effort to better explain the transformation Intel is undergoing.’

One example of this is a mini analyst day focused exclusively on the firm’s datacenter business. ‘That business might be the subject of a 30-minute keynote at a company-level analyst day or investor conference,’ Henninger explains. ‘The new format gives us more time to share deeper insights [and] investors seem to appreciate it.

‘We’ve also started to offer more experiential learning opportunities that bring our business and technology to life in a way PowerPoint can’t. In the case of the mini analyst day, that took the form of a narrated tour of a fully operational, high-performance datacenter. The tour helped emphasize the points we were making in the presentations. We’re planning to do more of both of those things next year.’