Live on the Web: Major Technology Conference
Major technology company executives will gather this week in Arizona, giving Wall Street hope of hearing some encouraging words about the battered sector.
Brokerage giant Credit Suisse First Boston will hold its annual technology conference beginning Tuesday at the Phoenician resort in Scottsdale. The event will include presentations from 200 tech company executives, including Michael Dell of Dell Computer Corp. and Larry Ellison of Oracle Corp.
And for the first time, conference sessions will be broadcast live on the Internet. They will be available to individual-investor clients of CSFB and its DLJdirect online brokerage unit.
Such a democratic touch at the meeting--which in past years has exemplified the benefits of insider status on Wall Street--highlights how companies are making sure their practices comply with the Securities and Exchange Commission’s new fair-disclosure rule, known as Regulation FD.
“Offering a Webcast of presentations and question-and-answer sessions gives companies protection against allegations of selective disclosure,” said Louis Thompson, head of the National Investor Relations Institute, a group of corporate executives.
CSFB’s conference has been the source of market-moving comments by tech executives in the past. In 1998, Western Digital Corp.’s stock rose 37% after Chief Executive Charles Haggerty told an audience at the CSFB show that his company’s business was improving.
Haggerty’s talk wasn’t broadcast, so only attendees at the conference could act on his comments.
News coverage of the meeting also had been limited in the past. Two years ago, only a handful of journalists were allowed to attend, and they had to agree that they would do no same-day reporting. Wire services, including Bloomberg News, were excluded.
Michael Kwatinetz, then-director of research for CSFB’s technology group, said at the time that the restrictions allowed industry executives to speak more freely.
This year, speakers should know that their audience extends beyond the confines of the Phoenician. CSFB has pledged to have live Internet feeds from four simultaneous sessions. Each would feature executives from a new company every half hour.
Cheryl Popp, a CSFB spokeswoman, said the decision to broadcast the conference on the Internet was less a response to Regulation FD and more due to the technology becoming “affordable and available.”
Popp said that notice of the Internet broadcast was being distributed to clients of DLJdirect, the online brokerage owned by CSFB that caters to individual investors. For more information, go to https://www.dljdirect.com or https://www.csfb.com.
To be sure, the conference broadcasts won’t extend to the conversations that occur outside of the scheduled sessions--by one of the resort’s nine swimming pools, or on its 27-hole golf course, or at the wine tasting led by Kevin Zraly, the sommelier CSFB is importing from Windows on the World in New York.
Still, making sure that “material information” about a company is reported in press releases and formal presentations is something industry executives are learning to do as they adjust to the provisions of Regulation FD, analysts note.
