How to optimise the effectiveness of your annual report within a reasonable price range?
An annual report is prepared once a year (as the name suggests) and is mandatory for most organisations and a powerful tool for many. This piece of communication presents information about your organisation to various audiences, including shareholders, potential investors, customers, employees, or even your competitors. How they consume that content affects their perceptions of your business.
If your annual report is simply slapped together as a statement of facts, you’re losing a huge opportunity to boost your brand. Instead, it should share your mission, highlight your brand positioning, and outline your business strategies and opportunities for the future, which in turn build trust and confidence. Let’s take a look at how these 5 SGX-listed blue-chip companies’ annual reports tell their stories to build and retain their stakeholders’ support over the course of time.
All Singaporeans and foreign investors would be very familiar with DBS Bank, the largest bank in Singapore by market capitalisation. This banking behemoth has been in existence since the founding of Singapore. Going through the oil and gas sector downturn and China slowdown since 2014 to 2016, DBS bank still managed to grow its earnings. With its big plans to diversify geographical earnings exposure in order to be less reliance on the Singapore market alone for organic growth, how did their annual report shed light to the performance and future of DBS under CEO Mr Gupta?
These are just some of the reasons we have been recognised as the World’s Best Digital Bank. Our digital transformation pervades every part of the bank. We are driven by one relentless purpose, which is to live and breathe innovation to Make Banking Joyful.
Another blue-chip stock with annual report that warrants attention is Singapore Airlines, the famed world-class national flight carrier of Singapore. Over the past years, the cost dynamics are highly in favour for the Company as oil prices plunged from a high of USD140 per barrel to about USD50 per barrel. Its earnings recorded a healthy CAGR of 25% over the last 3 years, and with its efforts to compete effectively against low-cost carriers by acquiring Tiger Airways and integrating with its existing low-cost carrier Scoot, how did they communicate their story in the recent annual report?
Singapore Technologies Engineering is an integrated engineering group in the aerospace, electronics, land systems and marine sectors. Over the years, it has diversified its businesses and geographies. It is one of two companies in Singapore that provides defence services, not only securing contracts from the Singapore Government but also winning contracts from the US and other countries for research and development, putting them in a sweet spot to continue developing new products and keeping itself relevant in the fast changing world. So how does it position itself in its latest annual report?
CapitaLand Mall Trust is Singapore’s first and largest retail REIT. CMT first listed in July 2002 and now owns a portfolio of 16 retail properties and malls that includes suburban and downtown malls in Singapore like Westgate, IMM, Plaza Singapura, Raffles City, and Bugis Junction. Being an integrated retail real estate business platform, it highlighted how its creative asset planning and enhancement in its retail environment and attractiveness to shoppers and retailers unlocked the potential value of its malls, propelling its growth and improving the yield and productivity of its retail space.
SembCorp Industries is one of the largest companies on the SGX given that it is one of the 30 constituents of the Straits Times Index. It has three business divisions – Utilities (Energy, Water, Waste Management), Marine & Offshore (through its 61% ownership of SembCorp Marine), and Urban Development. Though its revenue and profit has not been growing favourably over the years, it continues to explore new growth opportunities, expanding into energy markets of emerging countries like India, Bangladesh, Myanmar as well as China. So how was its story told in the annual report?
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