The past 18 months have been a consequential time for investor events. As travel restrictions have eased to varying degrees around the world, companies and investors were able to go back to in-person activities. As the resumption of in-person events gathered pace, participants were able to evaluate them side by side with the virtual events that had become the mainstay of pandemic activity.
This report looks at investor event attendance over two time periods: the 12 months from Q3 2021 to Q3 2022 and the last six months of 2022. We monitor activity in the four key event types – roadshows, site visits, investor days and investor conferences – for both in-person and virtual formats.
The report further investigates the levels of satisfaction with these event types among IROs and investors in both their in-person and virtual formats. Finally, we ask IROs and investors to predict what the future make-up of investor events will be and whether they see each event type as being primarily held virtually, in person or as a reasonable mix of the two.
Findings on activity relating to Q3 2021 to Q3 2022 are taken from IR Magazine’s Global IR Survey, conducted in Q3 2022, while all other data referring to IROs and their companies is taken from the next IR survey round conducted in Q4 2022 and Q1 2023. Findings relating to investors are from the IR Magazine Global Investor Survey conducted from Q4 2022 to Q1 2023.
This report uses the term ‘IRO’ to represent IR professionals in general and the term ‘investor’ to represent members of the investment community, both buy side and sell side. Data in this report from IROs is broken down by geographical region and market capitalization. For the purposes of this report, market cap is defined as:
Investor conferences are the most common event for IROs to participate in for both in-person and virtual formats.
More IR professionals attended in-person than virtual formats for every style of investor event in H2 2022.
Investors attended more than twice as many virtual roadshows and nearly twice the number of virtual investor conferences as they did in-person events in 2022.
With the exception of mega-cap firms, companies in every region and of all company sizes went on more in-person roadshows in H2 2022 than they did for the whole of the previous year.
Small-cap companies hosted more than twice as many in-person site visits in the last six months of 2022 as they did for the whole of 2021.
Asian companies held considerably more investor days, both virtual and in person, than their North American and European counterparts.
There is a notably higher appreciation among IROs for in-person over virtual investor events.
Overall satisfaction for in-person events is lower among investors than it is among IROs.
Most IROs expect the majority of future investor events to be held in person.
Investors think there will be more in-person than virtual events in the future, although not to the same extent IROs do.
As many Asian IROs think there will be a roughly even mix of in-person and virtual conferences as think they will be mostly in person.
Introduction
Event attendance and hosting
IRO participation by region and company size
Event satisfaction
Future of investor events
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Sponsor’s statement
Lloyd Bevan
Ash Govender, Maria Lovati
Kathleen Hennessy
James Noden
