EQT’s 2020 Annual Investor Meeting – “a truly digital experience”

During the past 25 years, EQT has invited its global investor base to its Annual Investors’ Meeting in Stockholm to present the EQT funds’ performance and activities during the past year. As the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has put a stop tointernational travel and large physical gatherings, organizing an AIM in its ordinary format was simply not possible - but cancelling was never an option. The situation called for innovation and creativity so EQT decided to reinvent the 2020 AIM to a fully digital experience. 

The AIM was aired on 9 June from a television studio in Stockholm and hosted by Marcus Wallinder, Partner and Deputy Head of Client Relations and Capital Raising. The event, which usually stretches across two days with presentations by all portfolio companies, was condensed into a two-hour broadcast. The agenda included panel discussions, interviews and presentations of the EQT funds’ performance, with EQT employees participating via video link from around the world and in the studio in Stockholm. With an invitation list of 1900 unique investors from over 800 institutions, all the way from Papua New Guinea to Peru, EQT’s 2020 AIM was a truly global and digital event.  

Christian Sinding, CEO and Managing Partner at EQT, commented: “Nothing beats meeting in person, but this year’s Annual Investor Meeting was as close as you can get to a ‘real’ event and we have received great feedback from the investors so far. Making it into a truly digital experience also plays well with EQT’s sustainable approach and it is a further testament to EQT’s inhouse technological expertise, which was instrumental in ensuring that we could quickly adapt the event to the ongoing circumstances.”

Jussi Saarinen, Partner and Head of Client Relations and Capital Raising, added: “After having organized 12 previous Annual Investor Meetings at EQT I was delighted to see how well-received this year’s digital format was by EQT’s investor base. A US investor wrote to us afterwards and said ‘it was like watching Bloomberg TV’ and a Korean investor called the event ‘very unique, interesting and cool’. The 2020 AIM was our largest to date in terms of participants and as EQT’s global investor base continues to grow I believe this formatmay be the way forward — at least in part.”