Earnings calls are the main way in which companies announce their quarterly and annual earnings as well as other types of announcements. These calls provide information about a company’s performance and future expectations and investors analyze conference call transcripts to better understand the latest company reports.
Participants in these webcasts include investors, financial analysts, and shareholders among others, with the company’s chief executive officer on the line fielding questions, along with the chief financial officer and other top managers. Real-time audio and video conferencing can be conducted on state-of-the-art applications such as Skype Meetings, Google Hangouts and Facebook Messenger.
Conference call transcription companies convert earnings calls into readable, searchable text records that can be archived, thereby allowing analysts to:
- Evaluate the calls
- Compare the results to successive stock-price movements and other events
- Compare EPS (earnings per share) to expectations
- Examine margins
- Calculate free cash flow
- Check company-specific factors
Listening to the audio recordings and reading earnings calls transcripts is thus a great way to gather information about a company’s performance and its future plans directly from the top executives of the company.
So where can you find such conference call transcription? Reliable sources of these earning calls transcripts include:
- The investor relations page on the company website will have transcripts of the conference-call Q&A labeled on the basis of companies. You can search for them on the website using the term “earnings”. Generally, these transcripts will be available under webcasts and presentations, quarterly presentations, and/or news and events.
- Another great source for earnings call transcripts and some limited audio recordings, Thomson One Street events. Searching this site will provide a list of all available earnings call transcripts for the company you are interested in for a specific time frame. The entire report or just relevant pages can be downloaded.
- If you are looking for the most recent transcripts, try Seeking Alpha. Use the Transcripts tab on the site to search by company name, ticker symbol, word or expression, or industry to find earnings transcripts.
- Factiva is another source for earnings calls transcripts. You can search for your company’s name and then search for transcripts by dates.
- You can also find transcripts on the LexisNexis Academic database by using the Source tab to find and select FD (Fair Disclosure) Wire. Enter a company name in the Search Terms box and choose the dates you want.
Audio broadcasts of earnings calls can be challenging to find as many companies make them available only for a limited amount of time following the actual earnings call. In such situations, these extensive archives of conference transcription are a valuable resource for market analysts and other stakeholders.
