Contact
Editor
Gene Winter
Greater Richmond
Partnership
23219-1234
Partner
Corporate Growth - Richmond Chapter
Read the Greater Richmond Partnership's other newsletters:
Catalyst: tracking innovation in Richmond, VA's advanced materials/specialty chemicals sector
BioSynthesis: tracking innovation in Richmond, VA's life sciences sector
Logistics: tracking innovation in Richmond, VA's supply chain sector
|
Investing by the Book
Chesterfield-based WILink connects clients to customers with annual reports, webcasts
by Jeffrey Kelley J.
Patrick Galleher maintains there is no substitute for the
feel of paper between a capitalist's fingers despite the
availability of all kinds of business information on the
Internet. "You can get the
financials a million different places, but we still believe
steadfastly that you're really reading the [hard copy]
annual report to get an idea of corporate strategy,
corporate culture," said Galleher, the chief executive
at Chesterfield County-based WILink Inc. "It's the same reason
on Amazon.com people don't download books and print them
off." Investors connect to WILink
through nearly 260 publications and Web sites such as Yahoo!
Finance and Barron's to order free hard copies of
annual reports to learn more about potential investments. In the stock pages of the Wall
Street Journal, for instance, a WILink client's ticker
symbol will have a small "club" icon next to it.
That club -- same as the one found on a deck of playing
cards or Galleher's Tiffany & Co. cufflinks -- means
investors can call or go online to order a glossy annual
report. In return, WILink's more
than 3,500 worldwide customers -- publicly-traded companies
and mutual funds -- get information about institutional and
typically high net worth individuals for their databases.
Companies also can see which publications or Web sites
investors are using. WILink calls that service
PrecisionIR, which ships thousands of financial reports from
the company headquarters off A service called Vcall
hosts via the Web corporate events such as shareholder and
analyst meetings or earnings calls. Its primary competition for
the Web-conferencing service comes from WebEx Communications
Inc. and streaming video from Microsoft. WILink was founded in 1989
in London. It expanded to the Last month, WILink went
private after a New York
private-equity group purchased it. The headquarters moved
back to the Richmond area, where it has about 70 employees. The company retained its
office in London and employs 46 in Great Britain
and Sweden. Galleher, 33, a University
of Richmond
graduate, recently took a few minutes to discuss the
company: Q: What has the
public-to-private switch been like? A: Good, so far. This was a
welcome privatization. It's not that we didn't
like being a public company, it's just that our size -- I
mean we're about $35 million in revenue -- didn't make sense
to be public any longer, even though there's a lot of
smaller public companies than us out there. Until we get to $100
million in revenue or something like that, it just makes
more sense to be private at the moment. Q: What has been the
advantage of going private? A: Less compliance. You
don't have to hit your half-yearly or quarterly earnings
numbers. Easier access to capital.
We don't have to worry about trying to explain [acquisition
plans or new product investments] to our investor base in
the public markets and worry about our share price dropping
dramatically. If the market doesn't like
the investment behind new products, then your share price
drops. And then you can't make the acquisitions using share
capital. Q: Would WILink ever list
on an American exchange? A: The Amex or Nasdaq --
small caps. Usually the holding period for a private-equity
investor is three to five years, and there's two exits: sell
to a strategic buyer [such as a company looking to fit a new
business into existing plans] or to float the company [by
selling shares to the public]. Right now the preferred
route is to sell to another private-equity firm or to a
strategic [buyer]. Q: People can go online to
a company's investor relations site and find all kinds of
business data without going through WILink. Has that hurt
your business? A: It's not. My view on
investor relations is that you have existing and new
[investors]. Your investor-relations Web
site really services your existing shareholders. People
invest based on sector, and they invest based on articles
and news. You don't get any of those on an individual
[corporate] Web site. They're going to be on Yahoo! Finance,
Wall Street Journal Online [and more than 250 other places
where WILink offers its annual reports service]. Q: There is much talk about
possible mergers of A: That's going to be a big
win for us. When the exchanges merge,
when Nasdaq actually buys the London Stock Exchange and the
NYSE-Euronext merger goes through, you're going to see
cross-border trading become much more engrained in the
investor mind. You're going to be able to
buy, in theory, a French company on the NYSE. So it's going
to make those French companies much more proactive about
reaching out to the Q: How much of the business
is sending annual reports? A: In Q: What major way has the
Internet changed your business model? A: We used to be
telephone-based, the phone rang off the hook. In 1997, we
started seeing the phone kind of declining and we said we
need a new method to get people to order [annual reports],
and the Internet became it. Now 85 percent of the
investors who use our service are coming over the Internet. Q: What obstacles does your
company face? A: It's the perception that
the corporate Web site is the only place you have to reach
investors from. Q: Why does WILink use the
club symbol? A: It started in the
Financial Times [in Great Britain]. That was the actually the symbol they had available to
use. The company was founded in
1989 as Company Annual Report Distribution Service, which
was CARDS. They went to the Financial Times and devised the
club symbol to let people know which companies they had
[annual reports] available to request. This article was re-published with the permission of the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
|
|
|