Global capital markets demand transparent, verifiable corporate communication. While Taiwan's enterprise sector boasts unmatched manufacturing strength and technological leadership, many companies struggle to translate operational excellence into market valuation. The rapid rise of passive investing, evolving international ESG standards, and geopolitical shifts have made capital allocation far more selective. Without structured investor relations, even high-performing businesses risk being categorized as a silent force on the international stage.
The Taiwan Investor Relations Institute (TIRI) addresses this market challenge by professionalizing investor relations across Taiwan. Established to bridge local enterprises with global capital markets, TIRI provides executive training, certification programs, international exchange platforms, and ESG governance support. In this executive Q&A, TIRI Chairman Jonny Kuo discusses the strategic necessity of investor relations, the integration of artificial intelligence into market communication, and how Taiwanese companies can build enduring credibility with global institutional investors.
Q: Many Taiwanese companies excel in engineering and operations but struggle to articulate their value to international funds. What structural gaps in traditional corporate communication inspired the founding of TIRI?
Jonny Kuo: Taiwanese companies are exceptionally strong at execution. In manufacturing, supply-chain management, engineering, cost control, and advanced technology, many of them already operate at a world-class level.
But after years of working across capital markets and corporate governance, I saw a clear disconnect: Taiwanese companies are very good at creating value, but they are not always equally good at explaining that value to the market.
Traditionally, many companies have viewed investor relations as a combination of earnings calls, material disclosures, press releases, or even an extension of public relations and shareholder services. But true investor relations goes far beyond distributing information. It is about helping the market understand a company's business model, competitive advantages, strategic direction, capital allocation, risk management, and management's long-term vision.
International institutional investors are not simply investing in one quarter's EPS. They are evaluating a company's ability to create value over the next three, five, or even ten years.
If a company provides the numbers without explaining the logic behind those numbers, the market may still fail to fully recognize its value, even when the underlying business is performing extremely well.
That was one of the central reasons I helped establish the Taiwan Investor Relations Institute, or TIRI.
Our goal was not to create another networking organization. We wanted to build a professional framework for investor relations in Taiwan.
That is why we have developed the TIRIC professional certification program, with the objective of making IR a discipline that can be systematically learned, trained, and professionally recognized rather than a function that depends primarily on individual experience.
We have also continued to develop the TIRI Awards, recognizing companies and IR professionals that demonstrate strong investor engagement, high-quality disclosure, and disciplined market communication. Through these awards, we want to establish clear benchmarks for what good investor relations should look like.
I often say:
Good investor relations is not about packaging a company. It is about helping the market understand the company more accurately.
That principle has remained at the core of TIRI since its founding.
Q: As Taiwan transitions from general corporate governance evaluations to a rigorous ESG evaluation system, how should listed companies evolve their sustainability disclosures to satisfy global institutional standards?
Jonny Kuo: The first thing companies need to change is their mindset: ESG cannot be treated as simply another sustainability report.
If ESG ultimately becomes more pages, better design, and a longer list of metrics, its value to investors remains limited.
The real question is whether ESG has been integrated into business decision-making.
Take carbon reduction as an example. Global investors are not only interested in how many tons of emissions a company reduced this year. They want to understand whether decarbonization will affect the company's cost structure, whether it will require additional capital expenditure, whether the supply chain will need to be redesigned, whether product competitiveness will change, and whether financing costs may be affected.
Those are the issues that truly matter to capital markets.
That is why ESG disclosure is moving from primarily descriptive reporting toward financial materiality and strategic relevance.
Companies increasingly need to explain how sustainability issues affect revenue, costs, assets, capital expenditure, risk, and ultimately enterprise value.
This is something we consistently emphasize in TIRI's education and professional development programs: ESG cannot be separated from finance, strategy, and investor communication.
Our international engagement has also made one global trend very clear. Although ESG expectations vary by market, investors everywhere are demanding information that is increasingly comparable, verifiable, and trackable over time.
In recent years, TIRI has continued to engage with major IR organizations including NIRI in the United States, DIRK in Germany, ABIRD in Bulgaria, TÜYİD in Türkiye, and HKIRA in Hong Kong, as well as other investor relations organizations across Asia and Europe.
Through these exchanges, we have seen that global markets are no longer satisfied when a company simply says, "We are committed to sustainability."
Investors now ask:
What exactly are your targets? How are you measuring progress? Who is accountable? What role does the board play? And if the target is not achieved, why not?
So in my view, the future of ESG is not about saying more. It is about making corporate commitments more verifiable.
Q: You frequently note that the true value of investor relations lies in making corporate trust verifiable rather than chasing short-term stock price movements. How do disciplined IR practices protect enterprise value during market volatility?
Jonny Kuo: I have always believed that the most important asset created by investor relations is not the stock price. It is trust.
Share prices move every day. They are influenced by macroeconomic conditions, interest rates, currencies, geopolitical developments, industry cycles, and market sentiment. A company cannot control its share price on a daily basis.
But there is one thing a company can influence: how much the market trusts it.
That trust is not built when a crisis occurs. It is built gradually, over time.
If a company consistently communicates its strategy, objectives, risks, and execution progress, investors are much better positioned to judge whether a difficult period reflects a structural problem or merely a temporary setback.
By contrast, if a company communicates very little and only appears when it has good news to share, then when bad news arrives, the market is more likely to assume the worst.
This is exactly why the theme of this year's TIRI Annual Conference was:
"A New Era of IR Communication: From Information Disclosure to Value Dialogue."
I believe that distinction is extremely important.
"Information disclosure" tells the market what happened.
"Value dialogue" goes further. It helps the market understand why it happened, how management is responding, and what the company intends to do next.
Those are two very different levels of communication.
The same philosophy is reflected in the TIRI Awards. We are not rewarding companies simply because their share prices have risen the most. We want to recognize companies that have built long-term, consistent, and credible communication with the market.
That is why I describe investor relations as part of a company's trust infrastructure.
Its value may not always be immediately visible when markets are strong. But during volatility, crisis, or periods of high uncertainty, the trust accumulated over many years can become one of the company's most important intangible assets.
Q: Artificial intelligence and data analytics are transforming market intelligence and stakeholder engagement. How is TIRI preparing investor relations officers to utilize smart, data-driven tools without compromising disclosure integrity?
Jonny Kuo: AI will have a profound impact on investor relations, and that transformation has already begun.
In the past, IR professionals might spend a significant amount of time reading analyst reports, organizing earnings-call Q&A, monitoring shareholder structures, and tracking industry developments. Today, many of those tasks can be performed more quickly and efficiently with AI and data analytics.
In the future, companies will also be able to better understand what different groups of investors care about, where analyst views are changing, whether the market is misunderstanding the company's strategy, and which issues are gaining momentum.
So I believe AI will significantly improve both the efficiency and the analytical capabilities of IR teams.
At the same time, however, it creates an entirely new set of governance challenges.
There is one principle I emphasize frequently:
AI can improve communication efficiency, but it cannot replace accountability for information.
A company can never say, "The AI generated this, so management is not responsible."
For financial forecasts, material disclosures, ESG data, and any information that could influence investment decisions, there must still be clear data sources, internal review procedures, and defined accountability.
This is also an area that TIRI intends to place increasing emphasis on through our professional education and the TIRIC certification framework.
We do not simply want IR professionals who know how to use AI tools. We want professionals who know how to govern their use.
The future IR professional will need to understand not only finance, industry dynamics, strategy, and communication, but also data governance, AI risk, information reliability, and disclosure accountability.
In my view, the most mature use of AI is not about helping companies say more. It is about helping companies respond more quickly, more accurately, and with stronger evidence to the questions that truly matter to the market.
Q: TIRI has expanded cross-border ties with investor relations associations across North America, Europe, and Asia. How do these international partnerships help Taiwanese firms gain direct visibility among global institutional investors?
Jonny Kuo: Capital markets have never been purely local, so investor relations should not be local either.
Over the past several years, we have made the internationalization of TIRI a major priority because we want Taiwan to become an active part of the global investor relations community.
We have continued to build exchanges and relationships with NIRI in the United States, DIRK in Germany, ABIRD in Bulgaria, TÜYİD in Türkiye, HKIRA in Hong Kong, and other important IR organizations across Asia and Europe.
For me, the greatest value of these partnerships is not simply greater visibility. It is about creating two-way understanding.
On one side, we want the international IR community to better understand Taiwanese companies.
Taiwan plays an essential role in global semiconductors, electronics, advanced manufacturing, technology, and supply chains. Yet international investor awareness of Taiwan is still often concentrated around a relatively small number of large companies.
In reality, Taiwan has many outstanding mid-sized companies, niche leaders, and globally competitive hidden champions. Many of them simply lack an effective channel through which international capital markets can properly understand their value.
On the other side, our engagement with organizations such as NIRI, DIRK, ABIRD, TÜYİD, and HKIRA allows us to bring global best practices back to Taiwan.
Different markets have developed valuable approaches to professional IR qualifications, investor engagement, board involvement, ESG, crisis communication, and interaction with global institutional investors. Taiwan has a great deal to learn from those experiences.
One lesson has become especially clear to me through these international exchanges:
Investor relations is a common language.
When a company understands the language, expectations, and analytical logic used by global investors, investors can understand that company's value regardless of where the company is based.
That is the role TIRI wants to play.
We want not only to bring the world to Taiwan, but also to bring Taiwan to the world.
Our mission is to help communicate the true competitiveness of Taiwanese companies in a way that global investors can understand, trust, and compare.
Q: Looking forward, what key governance priorities must Taiwanese boards and executive teams embrace to remain competitive in international capital markets?
Jonny Kuo: I believe Taiwanese companies need to focus on at least four governance priorities if they want to remain competitive in global capital markets.
First, boards need to truly understand the capital markets.
Boards can no longer focus only on regulatory compliance, financial statements, and operating performance. They must also understand capital allocation, enterprise value, and how investors evaluate the company.
Second, what a company says and what it does must be aligned.
Today, information is extremely transparent. If a company says it is undergoing transformation but its capital expenditure, talent allocation, and organizational structure remain unchanged, the market will identify that inconsistency very quickly.
Increasingly, corporate trust will depend on the alignment between commitment and execution.
Third, investor relations must move beyond being the responsibility of one department and become part of the broader corporate governance framework.
That is one of the reasons TIRI has continued to invest in professionalization.
Through the TIRIC certification program, we want the market to recognize that IR is a discipline requiring professional training.
Through the TIRI Awards, we want to establish benchmarks for both companies and individual professionals.
And through our engagement with organizations such as NIRI, DIRK, ABIRD, TÜYİD, and HKIRA, we want Taiwan's IR practices to remain connected with global standards and best practices.
Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, companies must move from disclosure to dialogue.
That is the central idea behind this year's TIRI Annual Conference theme: "From Information Disclosure to Value Dialogue."
Companies should no longer ask only:
"What are we legally required to disclose?"
They also need to ask:
"What do investors need to understand?" "What are the market's biggest questions about us?" "How can we answer those questions in a consistent, transparent, and verifiable way?"
I believe this will be one of the most important transformations in investor relations over the next decade.
Taiwan does not lack world-class companies, and it does not lack capable management teams.
What we need now is to ensure that the operational excellence of Taiwanese companies is translated into enterprise value that global capital markets can understand, verify, and trust over the long term.
That is the direction TIRI will continue to pursue.
The discussion with Jonny Kuo reinforces that investor relations is not merely a public relations exercise, but a vital pillar of corporate governance. When companies proactively engage the market with verifiable data and clear operational roadmaps, they transform market skepticism into long-term stakeholder loyalty. Moving beyond operational silence allows enterprises to secure fairer valuations and protect themselves against market volatility.
As institutional capital becomes increasingly selective, disciplined communication and transparent governance will dictate which companies thrive globally. Organizations that invest in professional IR talent, integrate modern disclosure technology, and embrace international standards will capture the world's attention. Through education, international alliances, and rigorous advocacy, Jonny Kuo and TIRI continue to provide Taiwanese enterprises with the tools and strategies needed to lead with confidence on the global stage.
To learn more visit https://www.tiri.tw/html/index.html
