Investor Relations Officer Helps Amgen’s Star to Shine

The commercial success of Thousand Oaks-based biotechnology star Amgen Inc. has brought the firm thousands of new shareholders over the past two years. The task of informing, servicing and sometimes coddling those shareholders has been Sarah Crampton’s full-time job.

For her efforts, the 39-year-old Crampton was named one of the 10 best investor relations officers in the nation last year by Institutional Investor magazine.

A Connecticut native and a Stanford University MBA, Crampton joined Amgen in January, 1989, when the stock sold for $5 a share (adjusted for splits). Today, Amgen is a $70 stock, and it is perhaps the most visible symbol of large and small investors’ love affair with biotech.

Crampton insists that no matter how successful Amgen becomes, “it has to remain accessible to large institutions and to individual shareholders” alike. The company’s shareholder mix now is 62% institutional and 38% individuals.

With 130 million shares outstanding, that 38% small-investor stake keeps Crampton busy fielding a lot of phone calls and information requests that might make some corporate officers cringe.

“We’re a lot of peoples’ first stock,” Crampton says, in part because many of the patients who have benefited from Amgen’s miracle drugs for anemia have subsequently become shareholders.

Some of those new shareholders have been jolted by the volatility of Amgen and other biotech stocks, which often rocket or plunge on the latest Wall Street mood shift. “Sometimes people just want to call up and ask, ‘Is everything OK (with the company)?’ ” Crampton says. “They’re just looking for a little bit of reassurance.”

She also has to dodge investors who ask her to tell them specifically whether they should buy the stock at current levels, which she of course can’t do. “They’ll ask, ‘Is that a good price?’ or ‘Would you invest now?’ I tell them it’s inappropriate for me to comment on that.”

Instead, Crampton offers to send any new investor the company’s annual report and to keep them on the company’s press mailing list. “We’ll send releases to anyone,” she says.

But she also gladly concedes that nothing tells Amgen’s investment story as well as its drugs. Says Crampton: “Our products are our best marketing tool.”