The man who made the annual reports of several Sri Lanka companies world class last week said that the reports today "are getting thicker and thicker to a point where they aspire to be encyclopaedias."

"Pardon me for saying this, but for all the flab, they hardly ever say anything useful. Even if they do, it's completely buried in a mountain of disclosures," Dr.Vijith Kannangara of Smart Media, the annual report company, told a gathering of business leaders last week.

"Companies today are simply stuck in a compliance mindset and are failing miserably to communicate."

Central Bank Governor Ajit Nivard Cabraal was the chief guest at the event where Smart Media felicitated its clients who had won recognition from the League of American Communications Professionals (LACP) established in the USA ten year ago as the forum to discuss 'best in class' practices while recognizing those who demonstrate exemplary communication ability.

Kannangara said that in the rare instances where companies do communicate something, they hardly even give a clue about the future. "And isn't that the obvious thing that a leader would want to know?"

"When the going is good for the company, the annual report tends to flaunt the story. And when it is bad, the annual report shies away from addressing the real issues. So it is not surprising that readers tend to ignore the written word and go purely by the numbers," Kannangara said.

"But if companies make a genuine effort to make themselves better understood, they would end up having a loyal following in both good times and bad. And there's no better way to making yourself understood than opening up to your strategy."

Smart Media today does business in six countries - Bahrain, Hong Kong, Oman, Qatar and the UAE in addition to Sri Lanka.

Their clients here won 28 awards at LACP this year while their clients elsewhere won another 11.

"These winning clients are also some of the biggest and most prestigious names in those respective countries. I have just returned from a whirlwind business tour during which I had the honour of meeting and felicitating four of our award winning overseas clients - Oman Air, the National Carrier of Oman, Qatar Financial Centre Regulatory Authority, Batelco, Bahrain's No.1 telecom service provider and Ithmaar Bank, a premier Islamic retail bank in the Gulf," Kannangara said.

The Vision Awards process of LACP recognizes and rewards outstanding annual reporting from companies across the globe. These include the Top Fortune 50 companies in the US, the China, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore ... and now, even the South Asian heavyweights.

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