Lights! Camera! Earnings Call!!

Lets face it – earnings calls are boring. Lawyers will tell you that this is a good thing because you are far less likely to get sued or have regulators come down on you if you don’t do anything splashy. So for most companies the earnings conference call has evolved into an elaborate kabuki theater consisting of 20 – 25 minutes of prepared remarks followed by 25 – 30 minutes of questions from analysts.

The prepared remarks are the worst – many times all you get is a regurgitation of the earnings press release, proving only that the CEO and CFO can read. This is because lawyers, ever fearful of Reg. FD, are reluctant to allow even the smallest snippets of information to vary from what has been “broadly disseminated” in a press release format. So you wind up with a highly paid executive reading dishwater dull financial information to analysts and investors who have already read the press release and put the numbers in their models. My guess is that with earnings season being notoriously busy, most analysts are only listening with half an ear to the prepared remarks while they multi-task on other things.

The question and answer sessions are a bit more interesting, if only because there is some uncertainty at work, both in the questions that are asked and the answers given by executives. Keep in mind however, that companies have a system for controlling who gets to ask questions, and when on the call the questioner will appear. Thus invariably, the company’s favorite analyst (read “biggest booster”) will get the cherished first question position, and the question is likely to be one that management has no difficulty answering. Thus analysts are often reduced to the role of the old Kremlin watchers, where  more information is to be gleaned from nuance, voice tone and innuendo than in the party line answers executives spout.

Now, however, the earnings call may be starting to evolve. Last week Yahoo’s CEO and CFO presented a live webcast of its second quarter earnings call. In most respects, their webcast was just like an earnings call, except you could see the executives. Thus, in addition to voice tone and inflection, analysts and investors could also judge body language. This also means that, unless it was done off camera, no one could surreptitiously slip answers to the executives. This is perhaps a small step, but it does add a few more points that investors can use in judging management.

A few days later, Netflix also broke with the typical earnings call with a slightly different format. In their presentation, which was conducted on Google Hangout via webcam and posted to YouTube, Netflix dispensed with the prepared remarks entirely and went directly to questions and answers. This is probably a good development, as it avoids needless repetition of financial information. The questions were compiled beforehand and posed to management by a reporter and an analyst. This may be a less salutary development, as it favors a single analyst and reporter, and while the company says that it did not see the questions beforehand, this process may be open to manipulation. In addition, because many of the questions were composites, there was no attribution of questions to any particular analyst, which I’m sure did not please the sell side community.

In general, both presentations were well received as bringing something new to the staid conference call format. I can only hope that more companies start to push the envelope in order to make things more interesting and to stand out from the crowd. Because, with disclosure to investors, as with classical economics, more is better - at least until you get to the point of disutility…