Another day, another share price trashed. Yesterday Ted Baker got the treatment, today it was Pendragon’s turn to feel the heat, the shares down 20% after it warned it will fall to a “significant” first-half loss.
The Pendragon statement wasn’t quite as clear as Ted Baker’s, but perhaps that’s just because the car market is more complicated than retailing.
If the fall in Ted Baker shares looked harsh, the hit to Pendragon was probably fair enough.
Though I still think that ten years ago, say, Pendragon wouldn’t have suffered quite so much as it did. A 10% fall was a big deal back then.
And as with Ted Baker, what the Pendragon news required from the flaks was more like Investor Relations than PR.
The flaks on both stories were more than up to the job, I should say, but it does feel like the gap between IR and PR is narrowing.
The notion that only one lot can brief City analysts and only one lot do the press begins to feel artificial.
If shares are going to crash 20% on a routine basis, the hacks need to be told pretty much the same as the analysts if they are to make decent sense of what’s going on.
Plenty of flaks seem able to do IR. I wonder how many IR folk are comfortable doing PR?
