Highlights: IR Magazine Awards & Conference – Greater China 2015

Conference recap: calm between storms


Mark Loehr (left) of Open Exchange listens to Gary Lam of Citi talking at the IR Magazine Conference – Greater China 2015

At the IR Magazine Conference – Greater China 2015, held in Hong Kong in early December and hosted by Citi’s corporate access team, IROs commiserated over a year of volatility and slowing growth, writes Neil Stewart. While they couldn’t know that just a month later China’s stock market would be hit by another slide, there was plenty of foreshadowing.

‘Think about who you should be speaking to today to counteract falls in the share price in the future,’ counseled Edward Soon, Ipreo’s head of Asia-Pacific sales, who said IR professionals looked too much in the rearview mirror instead of at the road ahead.

Suki Wong, head of IR at Anta Sports, one of the world’s biggest sportswear manufacturers, gave a presentation packed with practical crisis communications advice. Just 12 months previously Anta had faced disaster when its chairman was linked with a mainland China corruption investigation and was rumored to have disappeared. Wong described a rapid and open response to dispel doubts and rebuild confidence, including getting the chairman on a conference call with investors.



As one of the Hong Kong-listed stocks available to mainland China investors through the year-old Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect, Anta has seen huge demand. Wong described her initiatives to reach out to mainland sell-side analysts and increase exposure to Chinese institutional investors, including through WeChat, a social networking platform exceptionally popular with mainland investors and companies. She added that she gets advice about the Chinese investment community from experienced A-share companies, which, at the same time, are learning from Anta how to deal with international investors.

The audience of around 150 IROs and their advisers subsequently received a concise briefing from Brunswick on shareholder activism and joined a strong discussion on investor concerns and evolving corporate access platforms, with OpenExchange’s video meetings getting special attention. Presentations from Anta, Brunswick and OpenExchange are available here.

CASE STUDY: Communications champion

TCL Communication Technology Holdings has leapt into the All-Asia top 10 this year after not appearing in the rankings at all in 2014. Head of IR Kennis Lau, winner of this year’s award for best IRO at a small or mid-cap company in Greater China, started her career as an auditor and was a business journalist before joining TCL, where she has three others in her team. One is based in Shenzhen, the other two in Hong Kong.

Lau has certainly increased the company’s overseas non-deal roadshow activity over the past year. It now takes in locations in Europe, the US, Japan, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore and China. Overall, she says, there have been more than 200 one-on-one meetings: 60 percent in Hong Kong and China, 20 percent in Taiwan, 10 percent in Malaysia and Singapore, 5 percent in Europe and 5 percent in the US.

In terms of senior management members’ involvement with the IR program, Lau calculates they attend around 15 percent of the meetings with investors and she notes that the chief financial officer ‘will participate in post-results meetings with analysts in Hong Kong and Taiwan’. That hasn’t gone unnoticed by the investment community, whose members voted CFO Thomas Liu as winner in the category for best IR by a senior management team at a small or mid-cap company.

Lau admits the ups and downs in the wider economy have made a difference to the demands on TCL’s IR team. ‘Our business coverage is rather global, so both investors and analysts are very concerned about how the macroeconomic environment affects our business in the near term,’ she explains. But Lau’s IR goal for the company remains straightforward: ‘The objective of our policy is to provide shareholders and the financial community with a true and accurate picture of TCL Communication and its business performance.’

This company profile is part of a series of case studies that appear in the IR Magazine Investor Perception Study – Asia 2015/2016, available to professional subscribers to IR Magazine. To access a copy, please contact Dahman Djimani at +44 20 7749 9138 or email dahman.djimani@irmagazine.com.