5 insights from the best investor relations departments in Europe

With the Europe Awards and accompanying report, Investor Perception Study, Europe 2011, IR magazine also released a new index of European investor relations teams, the IR Magazine Euro Top 100. It shows which IR teams consistently perform best across a wide range of categories, even if they don’t score high in one particular area in the research.

With the release of the IR Magazine Euro Top 100, the IR magazine team and its readers have learned a few things about what it takes to excel, according to the analyst and institutional investor community.

Here are five insights from this year’s research effort:

1. It’s better to be pretty good at everything. Many of the leading companies, such as Novartis, didn’t accumulate enough points to win an award, but they have demonstrated the sort of IR savvy that makes them among the best in Europe. Sometimes, you become the best by doing everything well.

2. The U.K. and northern Europe got better at IR. Of the 30 companies in the IR Magazine Euro Top 100 that showed the most improvement, eight came from the U.K. Four each hailed from Finland, Germany, and Sweden. Denmark added three more.