Improving Shareholder Communication

My name is David Mendelawitz and I am the Founder and Managing Director of Cleveland Mining (ASX: CDG). I have not previously participated in the Hot Copper forums, as I believe these forums are a place for market participants to openly express their views, both good and bad – not a place for companies to interject in order to promote or defend themselves.
Having said this, I have recently been exploring avenues for companies like ours to increase their interaction with investors and shareholders in a meaningful way, and I believe that the Hot Copper forum offers a valuable platform for us to communicate transparently with investors and hopefully build trust and understanding our business.
I have long been a firm believer in utilising platforms such as Boardroom Radio to provide additional context and explanation around ASX announcements, which can only ever be a mechanism of illustrating key highlights. While announcements are normally carefully scripted, they often fail to fully inform as they only represent a fraction of the decisions, achievements, threats, opportunities and day-to-day work being undertaken by the Company. As a consequence, they are then often not understood by the readers – either by design, poor writing or a lack of background understanding.
As a result investors often don't get the full picture, struggle to build trust and are left with little choice but to be speculators on market reactions to news flow, rather than informed investors who can align their risk appetite and investment timelines with the business plans of the companies they follow.

I am trying to bridge this gap by looking for other ways to communicate with shareholders and potential investors, although I am obviously bound by the Securities Laws and Ethics in terms of ensuring that I am not providing selective briefings.

Working with Read Corporate, I have begun this process by recording regular investor webinars. The first one last month was intended to respond to questions that were sent to Read Corporate before and during the recording. Last week I recorded a second webinar responding to questions that were picked up by Read Corporate from Hot Copper and other market sources.
My ultimate goal is to find ways in which Hot Copper users can direct their questions to the Company, which I will then answer, if possible, in a regular recorded webinar. Whilst this is still a work in progress, please feel free to email questions to [email protected] and your questions will be compiled in preparation for the next webinar.

I do not plan to follow up this post with a discussion because, as I said to begin with, this is your forum, not mine. If you would like to discuss any aspect of our Company’s activities, please call my office on +61 8 6389 6000 and I will happily make the time to speak to you if I can.
Below is a link to the Webinar recorded last week, which has also been released on the ASX Company Announcements Platform.
http://clevelandmining.com.au/webinar/