Iridium Quant Lens NLP was launched in August 2020, which quantifies language sentiment of company Earnings Calls with natural language processing algorithms (Iridium Quant Lens: Sentiment Quantified).
Only 7.4% of Earnings Call transcripts are publicly available
A significant finding that emerged from our analysis is that the number of Earnings Call transcripts, which are available for companies in the GCC region, has increased strongly over the last five years. Overall, this is a positive sign.
Companies are starting to embrace Earnings Calls as a core component of their analyst and investor engagement efforts and, more generally, is indicative of maturing investor relations practices across the region.
Nevertheless, the number of companies conducting Earnings Calls, for which transcripts were available from July to September 2020, remains extremely low at only 7.4% of the 645 publicly listed companies in the GCC region.
In our view, the low availability of Earnings Call transcripts to the general public exposes a potential regulatory risk. Failure to announce Earnings Calls, or to make their replays and transcripts publicly available could result in regulatory sanctions, potentially risks breaching selective disclosure and, by extension, insider trading regulations.
