Annual reports are rarely read

Alarming study: the communication via annual report fails the target group in large part.

A study carried out by the German Institute for Share Promotion (Deutsches Aktien Institut DAI) gives quoted companies a bad certificate: only 44% of private investors read annual reports and even only 32 % quarterly reports. The survey was conducted among 470.000 smallholders.

This is “a catastrophe for stock corporations” states Bernhard Pellens, one of the authors of the study and professor for economics at the Ruhr-University Bochum.

Two factors are specified as reasons by the private investors: the huge amount of information and the bad comprehensibility of the texts.

The length of the reports probably can hardly be reduced – but the improvement of the texts provides a high potential. Here lies the key for the optimization of the communication between companies and their private shareholders.