Investor Corporate Site Visits (投资者实地调研)

Face-to-face visits by institutional investors to a listed firm's headquarters or plants. On the SZSE, these visits are mandatory disclosures; the resulting dataset is the basis of Abnormal Investor Visits (AIV). In US equity, similar activity exists but is unobservable at scale (Soltes 2014, Solomon & Soltes 2015 use single-firm samples).

What counts as a "site visit"

In the So Wang Zhang 2024 Investor Corporate Visits sample:

Included: in-person meetings at the firm's plant or HQ with at least one institutional investor (mutual fund or hedge fund).
Excluded: press conferences, road shows, media interviews; phone / video / email contacts (905 records removed); sell-side-analyst-only visits (kept separately as a control).
Median attendance: 4 institutions per visit; ~22% of visits are solo.
~77% of mutual-fund visits are non-holder (the fund had no position before the visit) — the visit is a vetting ritual, not an ongoing IR touch.

Why institutions do it

Lei Jing (CEO of Harvest Fund Management) in the paper's epigraph: "The significance of conducting site visits and in-depth research by fund companies is to consistently deliver stable and substantial returns to clients through professional expertise."

From So, Wang & Zhang's interviews with three mutual-fund PMs and three IR managers:

Fund PMs spend 40–50% of total working hours on site visits.
Visits are initiated by institutions, not by the firm.
In-person visits yield sharper information than remote meetings (facial expression, vocal tone, body language, supply-chain walkthroughs, plant conditions).

Why it is informative

Site visits are arguably the most costly form of in-person investor interaction:

Direct costs: employee salaries, travel, time.
Indirect costs: forgone alternative research time, potential price slippage if the visit triggers trading.

In equilibrium, institutional investors are willing to incur these costs only when they expect sizeable payoffs in the form of future stock returns. The 2012 Institutional Investor All-Europe Research Team Survey ranks site visits as more important than one-on-one conferences with management or analyst research reports for acquiring firm-level information.

The "costliness" story is supported directly by the COVID experiment: when travel was restricted and visits moved online, both the return predictability of the abnormal-visit signal (AIV) and the fund-level alpha of heavy-visiting funds deteriorated. Online AIV has no predictive power, consistent with the marginal value of a visit being driven by being there, not by the conversation itself.

Sample scale

China's A-share market:

~20,000 investor visits in 2022 — tenfold the 2012 figure of ~2,000.
~75% of mutual-fund visits occur before initial position.
50% of SZSE-listed firms host at least one visit in a given year.
Average hosting firm: 3–4 visits / year; median 13 different institutions per visit (rising from ~6 in 2012 to ~15 in 2019).

Key references

So, Wang & Zhang (2024) Investor Corporate Visits and Predictable Returns, JFQA. — the SZSE large-sample study; basis for Abnormal Investor Visits (AIV).
Cheng, Du, Wang & Wang (2019) Do corporate site visits impact stock prices?, CAR — documents event-window volatility and volume around visits and a link to subsequent earnings performance.
Cheng, Du, Wang & Wang (2016) Seeing is believing: analysts' corporate site visits, RAS — analyst-side analogue.
Solomon & Soltes (2015) What are we meeting for? The consequences of private meetings with investors, JLE — single-NYSE-firm study; investors trade profitably after private meetings.
Soltes (2014) Private interaction between firm management and sell-side analysts, JAR — single-firm study; private meetings complement public disclosure.
Bowen, Dutta, Tang & Zhu (2018) Inside the "black box" of private in-house meetings, RAS — Chinese setting, in-house IR meetings.
Han, Kong & Liu (2018) Do analysts gain an informational advantage by visiting listed companies?, CAR — improved forecast accuracy among visiting analysts.