Why the winners won`:` IR Magazine Awards – US 2020

Best practice interviews with the top IR teams from across the US

Why the winners won – IR Magazine Awards – US 2020

Awards

Why the winners won – IR Magazine Awards – US 2020

Best practice interviews with the
top IR teams from across the US

From introducing your new CFO virtually to completing a merger almost a year later than expected (and in the midst of a global pandemic) or working out the best way to stream robot surgery on a cadaver, US IR professionals have been facing the old, new and unusual challenges thrown up by 2020.

In a virtual awards event held in September, the top IR teams were revealed from across the US, with winners named either in the researched categories – decided by a survey of hundreds of investors and analysts – or by a judging panel in the nominated-awards categories.

Many of the winners recorded video interviews talking in detail about the challenges they’ve faced over the past year. Click on the conversations to watch these videos and get an in-depth insight into best-in-class IR from across the US.

Awards by research

General Electric

Best overall investor relations (large cap)
Best investor relations officer (large cap) – Steve Winoker
Best in sector: industrials

The arrival of Larry Culp as CEO of General Electric in October 2018 kicked off what Steve Winoker, vice president of investor communications, describes as ‘the start of a multi-year transformation’. That transformation hasn’t stopped because of Covid-19, despite the huge pressure. Winoker cites the company’s aviation business, which he says makes up the core of the company’s cash flow globally, as well as its healthcare arm (as elective procedures were pushed back) as two examples of pressure on the firm.

But the company focused on transparency and accessibility, introducing new CFO Carolina Dybeck Happe virtually, being a sounding board for management and helping the Street see the bigger picture and where the company would stand ‘on the other side of Covid-19’.

Kansas City Southern

Best overall investor relations (mid-cap)

Cross-border railroad company Kansas City Southern has ‘always been an extremely transparent company,’ says Ashley Thorne, vice president of investor relations, ‘but during these turbulent times, we’ve really stepped up our disclosure.’

Talking about how the ‘economic tealeaves were just too challenging to read’, resulting in the company – like many others – pulling guidance, Thorne explains that despite this, the company felt confident enough to provide alternative free cash-flow models under various revenue scenarios ‘to give investors some confidence we could continue providing cash even during a significant downturn.’ The company’s communications approach has ‘played out very well,’ she says.

Stoneridge

Best overall investor relations (small cap)

Stoneridge operates in a ‘generally cyclical’ industry – vehicle technology – and Matt Horvath, director of investor relations and corporate development at the company, says ‘we were really ready for a downturn – though not necessarily because of a pandemic.’

So Stoneridge was prepared, and in a very strong position, going into Covid-19. This downturn plan of action also meant investors and analysts knew the company was prepared. ‘As a result,’ Horvath says, ‘we haven’t been anybody’s biggest worry.’

LendingTree

Best investor relations officer (small to mid-cap) – Trent Ziegler

‘From an IR perspective, we’ve just been focused on transparency and over-communication,’ says Trent Ziegler, vice president of IR and treasurer at LendingTree, and winner of the award for best IRO in the small to mid-cap category. To meet the new needs around communication, LendingTree launched new avenues of investor interaction, including publishing a shareholder letter for the first time and providing interim business updates. The shareholder letter was particularly effective, explains Ziegler.

‘It gives investors a bit of a longer-form narrative – in print – they can more easily digest,' he says. 'It’s a bit more fulsome than the combination of your traditional press release and recorded remarks on the [investor] call.’

JPMorgan Chase & Co

Best IR by a senior management team (large cap) – Jamie Dimon, CEO & Jennifer Piepszak, CFO
Best in sector: financials

‘Busy, challenging, but also pretty rewarding’ is how Jason Scott, head of investor relations at JPMorgan Chase & Co, described his year in IR. The team, he says, has been trying to deliver a ‘business as usual’ experience in terms of getting the right information to shareholders, bondholders and analysts – all in an environment that has been ‘anything but business as usual.’

Talking ahead of the awards in September, Scott says that at that point, the team had had almost 500 engagements with investors and analysts, despite not having in-person meetings since February. He also talks about the real commitment from the top when it comes to senior managers' engagement with the investment community. ‘You can see it with the amount of time they spend with investors personally,’ he says. ‘But they also make it a priority for that next layer of management down.’

Casella Waste Systems

Best IR by a senior management team (small to mid-cap) – John Casella, CEO & Ned Coletta, CFO

‘There’s pre-Covid, Covid and now the world after,’ says Ned Coletta, CFO at Casella Waste Systems, talking about how to characterize the past year in terms of investor relations. Leading up to the pandemic, he says the company had ‘a really heightened sense of ESG’. Then Covid-19 hit and Coletta says the company’s IR focus became about how to communicate in such a dynamic environment.

Moving into the post-Covid world, Coletta says it’s more about ‘how you imagine the future’. And now that the initial shock period is perhaps over, the focus is returning to ESG. ‘I don’t think [ESG] is a fad,’ Coletta says. ‘I think it’s a way of measuring how a business model fits into today’s world.’

The Adecco Group

Best IR by a non-US company in the US market

Talking in September ahead of the IR Magazine Awards – US 2020, Nicholas de la Grense, head of investor relations at Switzerland-headquartered HR giant The Adecco Group, says the firm had moved from the crisis-management phase and was focusing on what recovery would look like. Talking about the impact of the pandemic on working lives across the world, de la Grense says he’s not calling time on the office, but expecting something closer to a 50/50 home-office split in the new normal.

In an interview that will no doubt be of interest to any and all companies, de la Grense says: ‘You can’t build corporate culture over Zoom.’

T-Mobile US

Best in sector: communications

Accepting the best-in-sector award for communications, Jud Henry, senior vice president of IR at T-Mobile US, talks about the excitement surrounding the firm’s merger with Sprint, completed on April 1.

There were, however, challenges in 2020 that required additional communication: the deal, completed ‘roughly a year later than expected’, will likely initially hit earnings, while T-Mobile US also saw a change of CEO on the same day, with former chief operating officer Michael Sievert taking the helm from John Legere – famous for his contribution to the company’s live-streamed earnings calls.

Best Buy

Best in sector: consumer discretionary

Best Buy has seen a lot of change as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Accepting the award for best IR in the consumer discretionary sector, Mollie O’Brien, the company’s vice president of investor relations, explains that Best Buy had rolled everything online in mid-March before making the ‘really difficult’ decision to furlough 51,000 employees a month later.

Although she says the company had been able to retain 70 percent-80 percent of its revenue despite closing stores, it has been through a number of operating model changes. This has resulted in not only more frequent calls with investors and analysts but also more frequent official communication, going from a quarterly release to one a month to ‘keep the Street on the journey with us in terms of what operating model we’re currently using.’

Procter & Gamble

Best in sector: consumer staples

Procter & Gamble saw demand for some of its products soar as a result of the pandemic, while others – razors, for example – went the opposite way. In terms of communication, John Chevalier , P&G’s senior vice president of global IR, says the biggest challenge was really just dealing with all the volatility as analysts worked to sift through what might be short-term changes versus enduring consumer trends they could invest behind.

‘Trying to help our investors sort through that without being able to commit to anything’ has been a real challenge, Chevalier says. ‘As the IR team, we have to keep reminding investors that the numbers they are seeing today are a combination of both the underlying health of the business and this additional stuff on top. Investors like to boil things down to a single driver. But that just isn’t possible right now.’

Danaher

Best in sector: healthcare

Danaher has had a ‘rewarding’ and ‘humbling’ year, says Matthew Gugino, vice president of IR and financial planning & analysis. The company closed its $21 bn acquisition of the biopharma business of General Electric Life Sciences (now called Cytiva) in March 2020, which Gugino describes as a ‘great business’ and, more importantly, one that is ‘playing a really critical role in the fight against Covid-19’. Danaher also announced and completed the IPO and spin-off of its dental business in December 2019, carried out an equity raise and a debt raise, and announced a CEO transition, with Rainer Blair taking over from Thomas Joyce at the start of September.

‘It’s been a pretty busy 12 months from an IR perspective,’ says Gugino. But he also takes time to thank the ‘70,000 associates’ who work at the firm and who, he says, have been meeting the Covid-19 challenge. It’s ‘humbling to be able to share their story and to be able to tell the broader Danaher story to the Street this year.’

Newmont Mining Corporation

Best in sector: materials

Asked what’s characterized her year in investor relations, Jessica Largent, vice president of IR at Newmont Mining, goes back to before Covid-19 hit. ‘It’s certainly been a dynamic year – the only constant has been change,’ she says.

The company kicked off 2019 by announcing its plans to buy Goldcorp – ‘one of the largest transactions in the gold mining space’. There was also a period where Newmont had a hostile takeover approach and ‘a short-lived activist defense’ before the company won shareholder approval and in April 2019 announced the creation of Newmont Goldcorp – the world’s leading gold company and a producer of copper, silver, zinc and lead. And all that was long before the pandemic was even on the horizon. ‘It was something new every day and we enjoyed it,’ says Largent. ‘It was a fun time.’

CMS Energy

Best in sector: utilities

‘It’s enabled us to innovate,’ says Sri Maddipati, vice president of IR at CMS Energy, of the last 12 months. ‘We’re doing things we always talked about doing but we’re doing them faster: we’re pulling forward the implementation of a lot of different technology platforms. So it has been fascinating and fast paced.’

Given all the change in the world as a result of Covid-19, Maddipati says investors want more frequent communication and more fast-paced and up-to-date information, including on ESG, and especially the S element more recently. In utilities – and especially as a public utilities provider – ‘your license to operate is key to having good social relations with regulators and your customers – and all your stakeholders, frankly,’ Maddipati says.

Awards by nomination

Etsy

Best ESG reporting

Since 2017, Etsy has had a very specific set of ESG goals, explains Debra Wasser, vice president of IR at the e-commerce company. And it takes these seriously, even doing integrated reporting using SASB metrics on the 10K – ‘which is unusual,’ she adds. As a result of the pandemic, the ESG focus has moved more toward human capital issues, such as the working-from-home situation – ‘which a lot of investors are talking about’ with regard to productivity when working from home, for example, says Wasser.

At the same time, Etsy has been discussing the impact it has on communities. It has been publicly supportive of Black Lives Matter, for example, an issue that was even discussed on the company’s last earnings call in August, Wasser says: ‘Because we do believe these issues are core to who we are as a company.’

Etsy

Rising star – Gabriel Ratcliff

Former sell-sider Gabriel Ratcliff, senior manager in investor relations at Etsy, is the winner of this year’s rising star award. The transition from the sell side to IR just over four years ago was ‘somewhat seamless,’ he says, with many overlapping skills. One of the tools he says he’s picked up from IR, though, is communication: ‘Specifically the art of telling a narrative.’ This ability to tell a story is a ‘very necessary muscle’ for IR, he says – but one that doesn’t always get enough credit.

‘It’s one of the things your management team relies on you for, but so do the sell side and investors, which rely on you to help them understand the narrative of [the company] from several perspectives.’ Having the hard skills, the financial modelling, the understanding of market dynamics, is necessary, he agrees, but storytelling is ‘one of the most important things I’ve learned that I use today.’

Medtronic

Best investor event

Performing live surgery on a cadaver is certainly one way to stay front of mind for investors so it’s unsurprising that Medtronic took the award for best investor event. It was one of the ‘most complex’ events the IR team at the company has pulled off, says Ryan Weispfenning, vice president and head of IR. ‘This was probably the most-anticipated event in the medical technology space in 2019,’ he adds.

Medtronic has a robot surgery system coming to market – a market Weispfenning describes as really a monopoly market at the moment. Until it was unveiled, Weispfenning says there had been a lot of stealth and secrecy around the robot, which only added to the anticipation on the Street. The firm took investors to Hartford, Connecticut – one of the few places in the world that could make an event like this possible – with some viewing the surgery in person while others logged in to a live stream to see the robot surgery in action.

US Steel

(joint winner with Prudential Financial)

Best IR during a corporate transaction

US Steel is ‘embarking on a transformational strategy,’ says Kevin Lewis, vice president of IR at the company that shared the award for best IR during a corporate transaction for a ‘complicated’ $700 mn investment in Big River Steel. ‘It certainly is a unique transaction structure,’ says Lewis, but was one that had ‘strong strategic rationale and value creation potential.’

The acquisition, of course, aligns with US Steel’s goals, but Lewis also notes that Big River’s unique position as the most technologically advanced steel mill in the US helped the team tell the story. ‘We’ve been very proactive in how we communicate with investors,’ he says. ‘We highlight Big River as our number one strategic priority whenever we can.’

MSA Safety

Best IR website

MSA Safety had launched a new website in early 2019, putting it in a good position when the world went virtual as the Covid-19 pandemic hit. The new site was designed ‘strategically so that it would help investors’ diligence process,’ explains Elyse Lorenzato, head of IR at the safety equipment producer, who adds that the site has seen a ‘significant increase’ in traffic since the Covid-19 crisis began.

‘It’s really rewarding for our team to see investors engaging with the content, whether they want a one-page infographic on the most recent quarter, video content on our multimedia platform or a full deep dive with an investor day deck,’ she says. Describing the new site as a ‘digital backbone’ for MSA Safety, Lorenzato says the site has been ‘a great enabler for us in 2020’.

Carol DiRaimo

Lifetime achievement

Now retired, Carol DiRaimo, this year’s lifetime achievement award winner, says she still gets questions – particularly when ‘stocks were falling off a cliff in March’. So what advice can she offer to those still fighting the good IR fight?

‘My message is to be as transparent as you can,’ she says. ‘Nobody knows what’s going to happen tomorrow so don’t make promises you can’t deliver on. Be empathetic to whoever you’re talking to and understand that in some cases you just don’t have all of the answers.’ Watch the full video for more insights from the multi-award-winning DiRaimo.

Other award winners

Awards by research

Best financial reporting – Microsoft
Best use of technology for IR – Microsoft
Best in sector: energy – ConocoPhillips
Best in sector: real estate – Essex Property Trust
Best in sector: technology – Microsoft

Awards by nomination

Best IR during a corporate transaction –
Prudential Financial (joint winner)