When a mid-cap listed company sets out to build its IR function, the first priority isn't headcount — it's securing three core capabilities: producing results-briefing materials, maintaining records of institutional investor meetings, and providing information to proxy advisory firms. Without all three in place, a company risks losing meeting opportunities altogether.
What Do Mid-Cap Companies Typically Get Wrong About IR Structure?
In the first few years after listing, IR structure discussions at mid-cap companies tend to start with headcount — "how many dedicated IR staff do we need?" But deciding headcount first, without the underlying capabilities — building out results-briefing materials, keeping records of investor meetings, and engaging with proxy advisory firms — does little to build trust with institutional investors. Conversely, even a lean team can sustain meeting opportunities if these three functions are running. For mid-cap IR structure, the first thing to check isn't the number of people, but whether the functions themselves exist.
The Three Functions You Need at Minimum
At minimum, a company needs:
1. Results-briefing materials — materials prepared for each full-year and interim results announcement that address the company's approach to cost of capital and share price. 2. Records of institutional investor meetings — a system for capturing, in a form the company can track internally, the questions, concerns, and requests raised in one-on-one and small-group meetings. 3. Information provided to proxy advisory firms — proactively supplying accurate information on governance issues ahead of the general meeting (AGM).
These three are not independent of one another: the content built out in #1 answers the investor questions captured in #2, and #3 turns the accumulation of the first two into an external governance evaluation. If any one function is missing, it shows up in the quality and frequency of meetings.
How Thorough Should Results-Briefing Materials Be?
Peer practice offers a useful benchmark. According to the Japan Investor Relations Association (JIRA) "IR Activity Survey" (2025 edition; fieldwork March 14–April 25, 2025; 962 of 4,113 listed companies responded, a 23.4% response rate; published June 12, 2025; https://www.jira.or.jp/download/survey/202506_newsrelease.pdf), among the 916 companies that conduct IR activities, 51.6% hold results briefings twice a year and 33.8% four times a year — 85.4% combined. For briefing presentation materials, 54.5% produce them four times a year and 35.5% twice a year, together reaching 90.0%.
Among companies that publish results briefings on the web (729 companies), Japanese-language disclosure was dominated by "presentation materials" (99.3%, essentially universal), followed by video (74.5%), Q&A (62.8%), and written summaries of the presentation (52.0%). In English, "presentation materials" reached 72.2% — over seven in ten — while video dropped to just 18.4%. For mid-cap companies, the presentation materials themselves are where to invest first; video and English-language coverage are reasonably treated as later-stage extensions.
Why Do Records of Institutional Investor Meetings Matter?
The same survey found that 90.0% of companies conducting IR activities have a system for reporting shareholder and investor feedback internally. The most common content reported was "content of meetings with shareholders/investors" (90.2%), followed by "feedback from information gathered through IR" (85.2%) and "shareholder/investor comments on management plans" (71.8%) (JIRA, "IR Activity Survey," 2025 edition, as cited above). Internal reporting mechanisms for meeting content are already standard practice at the large majority of companies.
Without a meeting record, a company cannot give consistent answers to the same question across successive meetings, and its case for engaging proxy advisory firms becomes correspondingly weaker. Record-keeping isn't clerical overhead — it's the foundation that supports both the quality of the materials in #1 and the precision of the external explanations in #3.
How Does IR Structure Affect Meeting Opportunities?
The survey doesn't directly measure meeting frequency by structure, but it does publish the spread in meeting counts. The one-on-one meeting rate (individual meetings with management) reached 70.2% (up from 65.7% previously) — over seven in ten companies. The breakdown by number of meetings: 1–9 meetings (28.7%), 10–29 (21.1%), 50–99 (10.9%), zero (14.3%), and 100 or more (9.6%), with a weighted average of 31.4 meetings. For analyst and institutional investor visits and interviews, "1–49" was the largest bracket at 38.0%, but the weighted average reached 127.7 — a wide spread across companies (JIRA, "IR Activity Survey," 2025 edition, as cited above).
These figures don't directly measure how good or bad a company's structure is, but the fact that some companies hold zero or very few meetings while others exceed 100 shows that meeting opportunities don't accumulate automatically. Practitioners widely note that companies with solid briefing materials and reliable meeting records tend to see more repeat visits and referrals from investors.
How Do You Compensate Without Dedicated IR Staff?
For mid-cap companies that can't staff a dedicated IR function, a realistic approach is to cover the three functions through existing corporate or finance staff working part-time on IR, or through external resources. In the same survey, 54.7% of respondents (down from 56.4% previously) said they had participated in JIRA's programs or used its services (JIRA, "IR Activity Survey," 2025 edition, as cited above). With over half of companies drawing on outside associations or training, using external resources to make up for limited headcount is common practice.
A reasonable order of priority: start by standardizing and formalizing meeting-record management (#2) so it doesn't depend on one person; next, use external specialists to bring results-briefing materials (#1) up to standard; and finally, build proxy advisory firm engagement (#3) into a routine workflow that a legal/IR staffer handling it part-time can run.
FAQ
Q1. At what headcount should IR staff become dedicated/full-time?
Published survey data doesn't establish a distribution for dedicated IR headcount, so no definitive threshold can be given. It's more accurate to judge whether a structure is adequate by whether the three functions — results-briefing materials, meeting records, and proxy advisory firm engagement — are actually running, rather than by counting heads.
Q2. Is outsourcing effective for building IR capabilities?
In JIRA's "IR Activity Survey" 2025 edition, 54.7% of respondent companies reported having used JIRA's programs or services (as cited above). With over half of companies drawing on external associations or specialists, outsourcing or using outside organizations is a viable option for companies that can't yet staff IR fully in-house. That said, it isn't a guarantee of results — it works best once a company has identified its own specific capability gaps.
Q3. What are the risks of an underdeveloped IR structure?
Thin results-briefing materials leave investor questions inadequately answered; without meeting records, answers to the same issue can drift from staffer to staffer; and delays in providing information to proxy advisory firms can put the company at a disadvantage in governance evaluations ahead of the general meeting. All of these tend to result in meeting opportunities failing to accumulate.
Summary
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Three functions to secure first | Results-briefing materials / Records of institutional investor meetings / Information for proxy advisory firms |
| Level of results-briefing activity | Twice yearly 51.6%, four times yearly 33.8% (85.4% combined); materials produced four times yearly 54.5%, twice yearly 35.5% (90.0% combined) |
| Internal reporting of meeting records | 90.0% of IR-active companies have a reporting system; most common content is "meeting content" at 90.2% |
| Spread in meeting volume | One-on-one meeting rate 70.2%, weighted average 31.4 meetings; analyst/institutional coverage weighted average 127.7 |
| Compensating for limited headcount | Use of external associations/specialists (54.7% of survey respondents); prioritize by function |
All figures are drawn from the Japan Investor Relations Association (JIRA) "IR Activity Survey" (2025 edition, published June 12, 2025; 962 of 4,113 listed companies responded, a 23.4% response rate). URL: https://www.jira.or.jp/download/survey/202506_newsrelease.pdf
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