The writer is a managing director at Frontline Analysts and the author of ‘The Unaccountability Machine’
The 2024 company results season has been well under way this month, leading into its strange postscript — the time of year when annual reports drop into inboxes and on to doormats. The earnings numbers are long since in the public domain, the conference calls finished and the price action has moved on, but still they arrive. Why do we bother?
Partly because it’s still a statutory requirement. But we can’t blame the regulators entirely for the extent to which annual reports have grown over the years. There’s an old joke among equity analysts that if you want to keep something really secret, publish it in a company’s annual report, somewhere between the section on management pensions and the statement on net zero emission goals. As the real action has moved to the headline announcements and investor relations calls, the annual report has turned into a repository of all those disclosures that everybody feels like companies ought to make, but which nobody wants to read.