I enjoy well designed annual reports – often as a casual observer more than an investor. They give you a chance to share interesting, often startling, factoids about a company.
Jeff Immelt in the 2012 (interactive) Annual Report
At the conference, we put a GEnx engine on the stage. People posed for pictures with the engine; they marveled at the technology and its sheer size. It was a reminder of two things. First, few companies can do what GE does; the scale we operate on and our decades of investment are a competitive advantage. Second, in an uncertain economy, long-term growth and competitiveness require the endless pursuit of innovative productivity.
Similarly, I recently returned from Sub-Saharan Africa, a region that was “off the radar” when I became CEO. Today, we are at a $3 billion annual run rate, and that could double in the next few years. GE could have “$1 billion Franchises” in Nigeria, South Africa, Mozambique and Angola. We are investing in capability and people. There are very few American companies in the region. But we could sell more gas turbines in Africa than in the U.S. in the next few years.
A GE annual report has never fully featured software and Africa. Today, we feel they are essential and we can lead.
Jeff Bezos in the 2011 Annual Report
Random forests, naïve Bayesian estimators, RESTful services, gossip protocols, eventual consistency, data sharding, anti-entropy, Byzantine quorum, erasure coding, vector clocks … walk into certain Amazon meetings, and you may momentarily think you’ve stumbled into a computer science lecture.
You may think investors would not care, but that was actually a very effective way for Bezos to explain Amazon’s large data center and other technology capex investments. It is a nice way for Immelt to showcase GE is way past its capital and NBC priorities just a couple of years before.
European companies have been even more creative
- Austria Solar delivered its annual report in invisible ink which shows in sunlight (in video below) a nice reminder of the company’s benefactor.
- Roche, the Swiss pharma company, Allianz, the German financial services company and others offer their reports as iPad and other apps for an interactive experience
So tell your accountants and your attorneys to make room for your marketers as you design your next annual report. Because annual reports are also read by many customers, prospects and casual observers like me
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