Thanks Manav.
First of all, let me say that I had no intention of speaking to the MD and my only intention was to speak to the Investor Relations Officer regarding AR and dividend. So I didn’t really have a list of questions when I got to know who I was speaking to.
How this actually happened is – I asked the person picking up the phone that I want to speak with the Investor Relations Officer. The line was transferred to someone I believe Manav spoke with. Not a very polished guy, speaking in crude hindi.
- He said the company has transferred the money for the dividend within 5 days of the AGM and it is now the banks issue. It is the banks that are causing this delay. (which was putting me off as it was difficult for me to communicate with this person)
-
Then he said the company has shared both the soft and hard copies of the AR to the BSE and he doesn’t know why the BSE has not uploaded the AR. Again saying that the BSE is causing the delay.
-
Starting praising the management and saying they don’t take a single rupee as salary (which I didn’t believe until I saw the AR and I would love to speak to the MD again on this topic
) -
Regarding Q2 results, he said he doesn’t know when they’ll be announced. He took my address details for sending the AR and said I’ll receive it soon.
Few minutes later, I received a call from the company and they wanted to confirm my details for the AR.
I confirmed my details (good thing because the other person had made a mistake in my address) and then started asking about the dividend payment issue again as I felt I could communicate with this guy a lot better,
-
He accepted the delay in dividend payment saying this is the first time they are doing a ECS and that is causing the delay. As I said earlier, he sounded apologetic about the delay.
-
Then he asked me how many shares of the company I hold? (Now I’m not sure if that is appropriate or not but I felt he shouldn’t have asked that)
I asked him if he’s the Investor Relations Officer (IRO) of the company or the person who I spoke with earlier? He said he’s the MD and the other guy I spoke with is a operational worker and doesn’t know much and that they only submitted the hard copy of the AR to BSE. -
Anyway, I told him I liked their company and hold XYZ shares and would like to 3-4x my holding based on their future performance. To try and talk about the performance he talked about the poor rural demand in current environment (I’m actually forgetting if he mentioned the poor monsoon as a reason because I remember asking him about the drought for the last 2 years)
On future prospects – He only talked about the immediate future saying H2 is generally better because of Navratri and Diwali and expected demand to pick up. -
I asked him about the Q2 results announcement and he said they’ll be announced on Thursday. So may be the hard copy of it has been sent to the BSE and have not been uploaded on their site yet. He also said that I can speak to him anytime if I have any questions.
Overall he seemed like an honest, humble and down to earth guy in his manner of speaking. I felt confident with the way he said that I could speak to him anytime.
The only caveat is that I’m not sure if he was trying to ascertain my shareholding at that time and whether if he knew my shareholding it would have made much difference in the manner of speaking.
PS: I refrained from sharing all this information on Wednesday itself as I wanted to wait and verify some of these details myself. Having received the AR, seeing the remuneration, reading the AR etc has definitely laid to rest any ethical promoter related doubts I may have had about the company.
