Tuesday, March 15, 2005

Don't blink or you'll miss it

Sometimes I write on investor relations issues, when I see something I don't understand or find strange. This qualifies, and I can't think of any explanation why it should have happened this way, particularly in light of the track record of replays and archived webcasts. Weird.

UPDATE: Similar weirdness in Germany. Today is DT's analyst day at CeBIT. Faced with a complex array of commitments here, I opted not to go this year, confident that I would be able to view the full webcasts, which were available last year. Until I found out yesterday that the divisional presentations (i.e., the interesting bit) would not be webcast... Instead, we got the "vision" piece from Mr. Ricke, and an HR presentation in English with Q&A in German, with no audio channel on the web for simultaneous translation. Seems to me that an SEC-registered company would happily do live webcasts of anything remotely material to the financial outlook of the company. Still it's an effective way of filling up EUR600 per night hotel rooms in Hanover. I guess the brokers should be happy, because this sort of thing bolsters their position as links in the information chain to the investor.

UPDATE 2: It's now later in the day and I'm listening to NTL management discuss a set of financial results, which no one has seen yet. No press release has arrived, there is nothing on the website, and CEO Simon Duffy apologized in his opening remarks for the fact that "not everyone had the release." I assume "not everyone" means anyone outside the company. Apparently they have had some formatting problems.

FINAL UPDATE: The report finally arrived, and the slides were posted to the website, about 20 minutes into the call, i.e., after the management discussion had pretty much ended.

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