I am currently doing some annual report in Malawi where the legislation permits the distribution of abridged annual reports in compliance with the requirements of the Companies Act and MSE Rules. Shareholders wanting a full copy are able to request one from the company. The result: a big saving of cash. Some listed companies are using some of their freed up funds to put extra effort into the integrated (full) report which is made available online in most cases in PDF.

Most of our clients use iPaper, online software that publishes PDF’s online professionally, avoiding the need for bulky downloads.

The future for us is taking advantage of our Investorpass shareholder communications platform to act as an audit trail of the delivery of online annual reports so that the paper trail is cut out altogether. In Africa the default delivery mechanism will be hardcopy for some time to come as Internet penetration rates are low, nevertheless those companies adopting the online strategy sooner rather than later will be ahead of the Governance Curve in the long run.

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