Active Shareholder Voice
Classifies named individuals who appear repeatedly as questioners on NZX-listed issuer earnings calls or as substantial product holders engaging in public Q&A. We deliberately use neutral framing — "active shareholder voice" rather than "activist" — because the same engagement pattern covers principled long-term shareholders, professional analysts, and traditional activists.
Where you’ll see this label: /activists and /analysts directories
What it measures
For each named questioner across our earnings-call Q&A corpus, we count distinct turns (questions asked) across distinct call events and classify their engagement style. Individuals who reach the threshold below are surfaced on the public analyst / activist directories with their verbatim questions, the issuer + call context, and the answerer attribution.
We do not infer intent. We surface the public pattern of engagement (who asks whom, how often, on what topic) and let readers form their own view. The label is descriptive, not normative.
Inputs
- earnings_call_qaVerbatim Q&A turns extracted from publicly-broadcast issuer earnings webcasts (Brightcove / YouTube / Vimeo). Captures questioner_name, questioner_type, issuer, call date, full question text, and answer text.
- analystsIdentified sell-side / buy-side analysts and their employing brokers, used for cross-reference when classifying questioner_type.
- substantial_shareholders (FMA Disclose)SHINTR / Substantial Product Holder notices used to corroborate when a questioner is on record as holding a 5%+ position in the issuer they are questioning.
Algorithm
Every Q&A turn is classified on ingest into one of:sell_side_analyst,activist_shareholder,shareholder_association,retail, orir_relayed.
An individual surfaces under Active Shareholder Voice (rather than the analyst directory) when they have 3 or more distinct turns classified as activist_shareholder or shareholder_association, across at least 2 distinct issuer call events. The 3-turn threshold is editorial, not statistical — it ensures we’re labelling a sustained pattern rather than a single appearance.
Source code: scripts/extract-earnings-call-qa.cjs · earnings_call_qa table
Editorial guardrails
- The public label is “Active shareholder voice” — never “activist” in display copy. We reserve the technical
activist_shareholderclassification for the data layer. - Anyone classified at the 3-turn threshold can use the public dispute & right-of-reply form to request the label be reviewed, contextualised, or removed. Submissions go to our editorial review queue with a 5-business-day response target; verified factual errors are corrected within 24 hours of being raised, and any contextual statement is published alongside the label.
- Verbatim quotes are presented in their published context (issuer, call date, topic), never excerpted in a way that changes meaning.
- If the individual is also a sell-side analyst at a regulated firm, they appear on
/analystsinstead and the activist classification is suppressed unless they exceed both thresholds.
Limitations
These are the known limits of the methodology. We disclose them publicly so readers can weigh the observation in context, and so that any qualified-privilege defence under the Defamation Act 1992 §16(2) rests on demonstrably fair and accurate reporting.
- Classification is performed at ingest by an LLM-assisted pipeline against the Q&A transcript. Mis-classifications happen — especially when a long-time shareholder asks an analyst-style numerical question, or when an analyst poses a values-loaded question.
- Coverage depends on us having ingested the underlying webcast. Issuers that don't publicly broadcast earnings calls, or whose calls have no Q&A segment, are absent from the corpus.
- The 3-turn threshold suppresses one-off appearances but cannot distinguish between sustained engagement and a single AGM where someone asked many questions on a single day.
- Speakers can decline to be named on a call (usually via the IR-relayed channel); those turns do not surface as named entries even if substantive.
- The label says nothing about whether the individual's positions are well-founded, popular among other shareholders, or aligned with the issuer's stated strategy.
Right of reply
Anyone named in connection with this label has a right of reply via the public dispute & right-of-reply form. Submissions go to our editorial review queue with a 5-business-day response target. We will publish your contextual statement alongside the data point or label it addresses. See Data Principles for the full corrections + removal policy.