Where Did You Say You Were Going?

I’ve said it before, but it bears saying again: investors buy a company’s stock because they believe they will receive a stream of cash flows in the future from the company. They only care about past performance of the company in so far as it gives them faith that the company will perform as they expect it to perform into the future. Analysts build their valuation models based upon future earnings, not past performance. So it’s surprising to me that companies don’t say more about what their plans are for the future – how they intend to make those future cash flows.

I would not want to make a general assertion about lack of forward looking information without any data, so I decided to do a quick sample of company presentations to see how much, on average, those presentations spoke to future plans. My search took me to the Internet to look for good examples of that staple of corporate communications, the PowerPoint slide show. If you go to investor conferences, almost every presenting company will accompany its speech with a slide deck illustrating their main points. What better way to quantify what companies are saying about their outlook for the future than by counting the number of slides they have shown to investors that contain points discussing the company’s future outlook. I thought it would be a relatively easy thing to go out and pull up the presentations of the various companies and analyze what I was interested in.

To my surprise, I found that it’s not quite so easy to go out on the Internet and find a representative sample of corporate investor presentations. In fact, what I found was that in a random sample of 20 large cap U. S. companies, only five companies (25%) posted their investor presentations from conferences. (I will admit that this is a small sample size, but you get what you pay for, and you’re getting this for free.)

In examining the presentations that I did find, it became obvious that companies were much more concerned with talking about past performance than future opportunity. My methodology was simple – I counted the total number of slides in a presentation and then counted the total number of slides that contained information concerning future operations. I tried to be overly generous in what I counted as a slide concerning the future, and any slide that had even a little bit of information about what a company intended to do going forward or the outlook for their products and markets was counted as being about the future.

What I found was that the percentage of forward looking slides in presentations ranged from a low of 6% to a high of 35%, with the average for all presentations being 20%. If we assume that the information being discussed generally follows in proportion to the slides in the presentation, this means that, on average, four-fifths of all information in presentations is about current or past activities. This is the equivalent of saying, “Not much new here; we’ll just make our money by continuing to do what we’ve always done”.

Now I will be the first to tell you that the bulk of all corporate profits come from continuing operations, but that doesn’t mean that those operations remain static. We operate in a dynamic economy - markets change; competitors react; new products are introduced; the economy impacts demand for the company’s products and services; and a host of other things mean that the future will not be the same as the past. Company presentations need to take these issues into account in order to give investors a clearer picture of where the company is headed.

In short, companies should spend a little bit more time and effort talking about where they’re going as opposed to where they have been. Because those future cash flows are a crucial component that investors use to value the stock.