Saudi Arabia

BNY Mellon Global Trends in Investor Relations – 2020

BNY Mellon has published its latest report on Global Trends in Investor Relations.

Middle East IR Pulse – August 2020

The Middle East IR Pulse, launched by MEIRA in collaboration with Instinctif Partners and Prose Solutions, aims to provide the IR community with a series of reports with regional insights and market intelligence from senior IR practitioners. Published monthly, each report will be supported by a webinar where our IR experts and guest speakers will discuss key findings to unlock trends that will help drive planning and decision making, and understand what’s making IR professionals tick and what’s changing (or not) in our markets.

Middle East IR Pulse – July 2020

The Middle East IR Pulse, launched by MEIRA in collaboration with Instinctif Partners and Prose Solutions, aims to provide the IR community with a series of reports with regional insights and market intelligence from senior IR practitioners. Published monthly, each report will be supported by a webinar where our IR experts and guest speakers will discuss key findings to unlock trends that will help drive planning and decision making, and understand what’s making IR professionals tick and what’s changing (or not) in our markets.

Middle East IR Practitioners Survey 2019

The Middle East IR Practitioners Survey 2019, produced by MEIRA in collaboration with Carter Murray, was released at the 2019 MEIRA Annual Conference. This year's report includes some case studies and interviews with IR professionals in order to analyse the results of our annual survey.

Saudi Exchange ESG Guidelines

In 2018, Saudi Exchange (formerly the Saudi Stock Exchange ‘Tadawul’) became a partner exchange supporting the UN Sustainable Stock Exchanges Initiative and working to promote ESG awareness, initiatives and encourage sustainable investment, in collaboration with market participants such as issuers and investors.

Since then, Saudi Exchange has engaged with listed companies, standards-setters, index providers, ratings providers, investors, and other stock exchanges, through a myriad of mediums to help advance ESG disclosure in the Saudi capital market. The Exchange feels a responsibility to support the advancement of ESG in Saudi Arabia, and the wider region, and so it remains focused on raising awareness and encouraging listed companies to disclose ESG.

These guidelines have been created as a useful resource for listed companies to help them navigate ESG.

Tadawul Investor Relations Best Practice Toolkit

The aim of the IR Toolkit is to assist those companies through examining the key principles of underlying current international practices, and an explanation of the benefits for doing so.

Crisis Communications: Developing an IR strategy for COVID-19

The impact of COVID-19 is being felt broadly, across all regions, sectors and markets. The Investor Relations (IR) professional plays a critical role in how a company communicates through rapidly changing market dynamics. In addition to a well-thought-out crisis communications plan, it is crucial for companies to showcase basic tenets of good corporate governance, such as their leadership and business resiliency, as well as to maintain control of the dialogue when handling a crisis like COVID-19.

Post-COVID-19: Reshaping business in the Middle East

For nearly all public companies in the region, the Covid-19 pandemic has created unique and profound challenges. The effects of the pandemic, including business interruption as a result of social distancing and closure policies, have meant that management and the Board have had to address unprecedented headwinds and adapt quickly to weather the storm. As restrictions begin to ease across the region and business leaders begin to prepare for operations in a post Covid-19 world, MEIRA surveyed issuers across the region to understand common challenges companies are facing, where priorities lie for management and the Board, and how companies can improve engagement with investors during and after this time.

COVID-19: The Governance Imperative

Let’s consider two companies. First, one in the manufacturing, dairy and food sector, of course, particularly crucial in times of food safety and security. And the other in the banking sector, again, in many ways, providing the economic lifeblood of funding to regional companies. Both companies represent clear, purposeful, yet nuanced strategic and tactical approaches to the worst global pandemic in our lifetime.   To set the scene and better understand the context of the adverse operating and regulatory environment, we asked a leading capital markets lawyer to help us understand the response from regulators in a time of COVID-19. As in all our MEIRA Word articles, the pivotal role of IR will feature front and centre. 

Investor communication in a time of uncertainty

Each day, IROs are presented with new and seemingly impossible challenges to overcome. The outbreak of the COVID-19 has impacted the capital markets but also the entire world and its population. During a crisis, a successful IR function should focus on proactively engaging and communicating with the investment community. This white paper presents some practical pointers to understand how to successfully manage a crisis from an IR perspective, but also some international case studies on how corporates are addressing the current pandemic challenges.

MEIRA Word: Crisis, what crisis?

We’ll start with the topical case of DP World and its recent announcement that it plans to delist from Nasdaq Dubai this year. While on the face of it, this is a story that hit the markets hard, there is always another way to look at this. Above all, one common element in all our MEIRA Word articles will be the role of IR. We are fortunate to have DP World, a perennial IR award winner, as a supportive member willing to share their IR best practice.

The opportunities and challenges of a potential MSCI classification upgrade

MSCI Inc. announced in June 2017 that is to open a consultation into the status of the Tadawul in its market classifications, with the potential for Saudi Arabia to be officially recognised as an emerging market as early as June 2018.