Investor Relations

In 2012, I switched to a Hong Kong-listed real estate company. This time my title was Director of Investor Relations, reporting directly to the CFO. The team had three people, including myself.

IR work for Hong Kong stocks is very different from A-shares. The proportion of institutional investors is much higher, and their questions are more detailed. I remember during one roadshow, a fund manager from Singapore pulled out an Excel spreadsheet — it was a five-year cash flow model of our company that he had built himself. He pointed to a number in the third year and asked me if this assumption was correct. That number was the provision ratio for land appreciation tax.

I worked at that real estate company for four years. The reason I left in 2016 was that the company decided to go private and delist. The IR work during privatization is very unique — we had to help convince minority shareholders to accept the tender offer price. This I couldn't do.

From 2016 to 2019, I was at a technology company. This company went public in 2018, and I joined during the IPO stage. The workload for IPO-stage IR is about five times that of normal times. Every number in the prospectus needs a source, every sentence needs to be justifiable. We had meetings with lawyers and auditors for three months, and the printed meeting minutes were half a meter tall.

In 2020, I started doing consulting on my own. During the pandemic, many companies suddenly realized they needed professional IR support because stock price volatility was too high and shareholders had too many questions. My current clients are mostly small to medium-sized listed companies with revenues between 500 million and 5 billion RMB.

The biggest change facing the industry now is the transformation in how information spreads. Ten years ago, research reports were the main source of information. Fund managers read reports, then decided whether to buy. Now, social media, financial bloggers, and retail investor forums all influence stock prices. One of my clients' stocks was called out by a financial blogger last year for accounting fraud, and it dropped 8% that day. In reality, that blogger hadn't even finished reading the financial statements — it was just taken out of context.

In this situation, the scope of IR work has expanded. Before, we only needed to manage institutional investors. Now we also need to monitor public sentiment. Some companies specifically hire sentiment monitoring staff and place them within the IR team.

The regulatory environment is also changing. After the registration system, information disclosure requirements have become more detailed. Things that could be handled vaguely before can no longer be. The time we spend on compliance has increased by at least one-third compared to before.

After fifteen years in the industry, my understanding of the investor relations profession has changed several times. At first, I thought it was a technical job — just know how to write reports and make PPTs. Later, I thought it was a communication job — knowing how to speak and read people was most important. Now I think both of these are important, but the most important thing is that you must understand the company's business — truly understand it, not the kind of understanding where you just memorize numbers.