History

From its beginnings in Colombo, Sri Lanka in 1994, Smart Media The Annual Report Company has championed a strategic, communications-based approach to financial and corporate reporting.

As the practice of supplementary presentation "beyond the numbers" grew in popularity with firms around the world, a variety of competing "standard reporting formats" gained traction. In our opinion, none of these formats offered a one-size-fits all solution.

Instead, Smart, by now the leader in its home market, chose to develop a reporting approach based on the use, with adaptation, of the most appropriate reporting format for a given client and/or strategic situation. We begin every commission with a clean slate and an open mind.

Over the years, we have used this approach to help clients in South Asia and the Middle East produce harder-working, more strategically effective annual reports and other corporate communications material.

Today, Smart Media The Annual Report Company brings this more effective and professional approach to developing and producing annual reports to clients in Singapore and the ASEAN Region.

Philosophy

Traditionally, private and public firms alike favoured a "need-to-know" approach to financial and corporate reporting. Few went beyond the boundaries of statutory disclosure. Then, in the 1980s, firms began to see statutory reports as a medium for communicating corporate and even marketing messages. Company annual reports began to resemble product brochures and sales catalogues.

Over the next two decades, statutory and regulatory authorities drove a trend towards enhanced reporting on corporate governance, regulatory compliance and risk management. Organisations discovered that a more open approach to reporting was good for public and stakeholder relations. Thus began the era of triple-bottom-line reporting, with firms reporting their impacts on society and the environment as well as their operational and financial performance.

Today, firms face a bewildering variety of regulatory requirements and disclosure options. Most cope with the confusion by adopting an ad hoc approach and relying on the magic of imaginative graphic design to make their reports stand out. Design and print production houses tend to encourage this, since it plays to their greatest strength: visualisation.

To us, however, this buffet of disclosure options and reporting formats represents an opportunity for firms to custom-tailor their annual and other reports to be media of strategic communications. By selecting the right disclosure options and formats, we make your reports work harder, communicating exactly what you want to say to shareholders, investors and others. This is not simply about image, but about communications in support of business objectives and goals.

We acknowledge the central importance of design but always in the service of good communications. We believe in corporate reporting that means business.

To see how we realise this philosophy on behalf of our clients, take a look at some case studies.