Online annual reporting in 2009 – mediocrity or innovation?

Will creativity suffer the slow death of diminishing budgets this year or will innovation come to its rescue? I’ve been in the annual reporting business here in Australia since 1980 and witnessed quite a few changes. In 2000 HTML online reporting was making inroads in the US from which I took great inspiration. When my company Heywood Innovation introduced HTML online annual reporting (mini websites) to Australia in 2001 with Cashcard, it prompted many enquiries the following year which resulted in us designing and producing a new era of HTML reports for the likes of AMP, Commonwealth Bank and Perpetual – all prominent and influential companies with substantial shareholder bases. It seemed as though we were faced with a huge new opportunity. A positive renaissance of reporting. How wrong I was.



The dot com crash of March 2000 to October 2002 didn’t help matters. Despite the economy gaining strength in the following years, 2003 to 2007 witnessed annual reporting budgets slashed to the bone and mediocrity gaining the upper hand. All of a sudden the prospect of shareholders having access to a new and highly efficient means of accessing financial information meant very little. What caused this apparent denial of shareholder interest and care? Did the powers-that-be decide that shareholders meant very little in the grand scheme of things and that they are at best a minor irritation unworthy of serious consideration? I rather think so. Investor communications have been in the doldrums for many years. Despite much pontificating here in Australia by the respective industry bodies the IR efforts of many companies leave much to be desired. This has not been helped by the dominance of the share registry market by its two well known players Computershare and Link. Admirable for their introduction of new technologies and processes to speed up the transfer of information between company and shareholder, it is significant however that in the past five to seven years not a single company I have spoken with has had anything positive to say about either. Service appears to be a real issue.

I digress. The change in Legislation in late 2007 that made online the default medium for annual reporting was an admirable initiative by government to make reporting less expensive and less onerous a task. Despite the fabulous opportunities to embrace cutting edge online design, animation and video, Australian companies however are proving very slow to leverage the opportunity. Consequently the results are a little predictable with many companies only moving to the half way stage of ‘interactive imaged solutions’ perpetuating the aggravation of trying to make pages from the printed report work on screen. A bit like pitting Robert Louis Stephenson’s Rocket against the Bullet train. Is it too soon since the Legislation changed? Probably so. Innovation, like change, takes time in the real world.

Tony Heywood is a Fellow of the Design Institute of Australia, founder of Heywood Innovation in Sydney Australia and joint founder of BrandSynergy in Singapore.

View some of Heywood’s work on www.heywood.com.au

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Companies not responding to climate change

I was intrigued to read an article last week describing how a coalition of institutional investors and public interest groups in the US are pressuring nine companies to develop and disclose how they are responding to climate change.

The nine have been identified as lagging behind what the group consider to be appropriate reporting on the business challenges and are failing to engage effectively with shareholders on the issue.

I predict we will see many more pressure groups put companies on their ‘climate watch’ lists, as it becomes increasingly obvious that poor environmental practice has the potential to seriously impact on share prices.

ExxonMobil, Chevron and General Motors are three of the nine companies.

The group sentiment is that companies’ lack of climate risk disclosure is as great a risk as that of the subprime crisis.

I guess it is inevitable that a company’s environmental initiatives, overall strategy and ability to keep shareholders informed of these have come under increasing scrutiny in recent years. These however face the prospect of being derailed by focus on the continuing mayhem in the financial markets. The prospects of a significant global deal on climate change looks increasingly unlikely. Sadly good environmental practice is initiated from wealth rather than from poverty. And a climate deal is all about imposing substantial costs.

I can’t help wondering how Chinese investors feel about the one new coal-fired power station that gets commissioned every week?

Tony Heywood is a Fellow of the Design Institute of Australia, founder of Heywood Innovation in Sydney Australia and joint founder of BrandSynergy in Singapore.

View some of Heywood’s work on www.heywood.com.au

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