The seventh edition of the competition "Golden Website of Issuer" is coming to the end. This is an excellent opportunity to make a summary of communication quality of listed companies via the Internet. Conclusions are much more optimistic than previous year, but there is still very much to be done. The results of the analysis of websites of all listed companies (in the last edition there were 889 issuers) like every year, shall be published in a special report. However, today we can draw first conclusions. The most important of them is that after a decline in the quality of communication in 2012, lots of companies improved their online investor relations a lot.

The Competition "Golden Website of Issuer" is in progress throughout the whole year and is being realized in three stages. The first is analysis of all internet communications. Issuers are divided into five categories: large companies (WIG20 and mWIG40), medium companies (sWIG80), small companies (other from regulated market), NewConnect market companies (the largest group of 436 issuers) and foreign companies. Average achieved results are better than in the previous year, in all of those categories. Graduation observed in previous years was maintained: from the largest to the smallest companies,and at the end - foreign companies. The difference in results is on a very high level - if we adopt the level of communication to be 100, than companies reached 83% of this result, small 76 percent., issuers of NewConnect 53 %, and foreign companies just 45 percent.

It should be noticed, however, that quality of bilateral communication has improved much - more companies respond e-mails from investors, though there is much to improve, especially in case of smaller companies. 4% of large companies did not respond to any of the questions asked by an investor, 18 percent of medium companies, 22 percent of small companies, 34 percent of NewConnect companies and 44 percent of foreign companies. A very significant improvement has been noticed in information content of web pages, in all groups of companies. It is also to be noticed that usability of services rose a lot (except for the companies from NewConnect), including mainly improved search engines operations (though it is still surprising, why more than half of web pages does not have a content search engine) and availability (measured at server response time).

While still a large drawback is a very low use of modern technologies of communication, even in a very easy way of defining this "modernity" as: chats, blogs, forums, social networking sites, RSS feeds and mobile version website. Despite noticeable improvement in relation to previous years, the rating in relation to above mentioned elements is still very low.

The second stage of the competition is qualitative assessment of several best websites by nine groups of experts. The results are comparable to those achieved in previous edition of the competition. This leads to the conclusion that quality of websites increases proportionally to expectations of experts. Gradation of individual categories of companies is slightly different from that of first stage and there is much smaller variety of scores. If we assume the average result achieved by large companies to be 100, than medium companies reached 91 percent, foreign companies 86 percent, small companies 85 percent and NewConnect companies 83 percent.

The analysis of results based on nine criteria allow to conclude that we can observe a significantly lower assessment given by individual and foreign investors. This, however is rather the prove for rising expectations of information receivers, not a decrease in quality of communication of the companies, as objective measures indicate that the quality of web pages is increasing in all areas, including information content and used technologies. However, this is a clear signal that these expectations should be realized and companies should pay particular attention to them. As a positive aspect we should take a much better evaluation of innovation in communication, although this is still a criterion, where assessments are the lowest (average 4.19 out of 10)The third stage of the competition is choosing the best of the best by chapter house composed of people representing different areas of the market, communication, information technology or aesthetics. Year by year it is increasingly difficult task because of raising the level of competition - in the final stage all web sites are very good and nuances have influence on final result. I hope that websites of not only the winners, but also of all 15 nominated companies will become an inspiration to raise quality of internet communication of issuers with all groups of stakeholders, including current and potential shareholders.

On 4 June during 6th Congress of Investor Relations of Listed Companies SEG a ceremony of granting statuettes to winners of the competition "Golden Website of Issuer VII" took place.

The winners of 7th edition of Golden Website of Listed Companies are:
  • AZOTY Group (Category: companies belonging to WIG20 and mWIG40)
  • PELION (category: listed companies belonging to sWIG80)
  • K2 INTERNET (category: companies listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange non-WIG20, mWIG40, sWIG80)
  • LUG(category: listed companies listed on alternative NewConnect market)
  • Serinus ENERGY (category: foreign companies listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange, including the NewConnect market)

Special Prize of the Minister of State Treasury for the best communication with individual investors performed via web page received Inter Cars SA. 

PEKAO BANK was honoured with a special award of WSE Media regarding RI using modern methods of Internet communication.

source: Parkiet
05-06-2014
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