Small Cap Awards 2019: Project Heather celebrates the Impact Company of the Year
By Anna Murphy, Head of Community
Inaugurated in 2013, the Small Cap Awards is an annual event celebrating and rewarding the finest in the sub-£100m market cap quoted company sector. This year, with Project Heather as headline sponsor, it welcomed over 200 guests — supporters of the small cap community — to this black tie and highland dress event in London, all supporters of the small cap community. Companies and advisors were present at the evening hosted by Peter Dickson (the voice of television programme The X-Factor) with a gripping keynote speech delivered by Nick Leeson, a household name in Britain for his role in the collapse of Barings Bank).
Small-caps are often overshadowed by larger, better-known names. They receive scant analyst coverage, meaning that development and innovation goes unnoticed in comparison to news emerging from larger companies. They’re both riskier, but that risk can translate to outperformance versus their larger counterparts — in times of strong economic growth especially. Unfortunately, they are more quickly and heavily affected by political instability, as Alan Rowsell, manager of the Standard Life Investments Global Smaller Companies fund, highlights:
“Small caps tend to outperform when the global economy is improving so headwinds to growth like the US-China trade war have held small caps back in the last year or so. Any resolution to these issues should see small caps resume their historic trend of outperformance.”
Project Heather is determined to support the growth of small cap companies on its exchange, not only because they consistently outperform in the long term, but because they are a powerful engine of job creation and therefore underpin economic growth. As a new stock exchange determined to become a role model for how public markets can and should positively contribute towards society, Project Heather considers inclusion of these perceived underdogs as crucial.
Project Heather was therefore delighted to be the headline sponsor last night for the Small Cap Network UK’s largest annual event — a ‘once-in-a-year opportunity to recognise outstanding achievement focused on smaller quoted companies’, across nine categories.
Within those categories the Project Heather team was most interested in — without doubt — the Impact Company of the Year.
Indeed, it was six years ago that our founder and CEO, Tomás Carruthers, created the first ever Impact Company of the Year Award in collaboration with the Small Cap Network, sowing the seeds of his goal to bring impact to public markets, at a time when sustainability, ethics and social impact were widely considered outside the remit of traditional finance. That today he is pioneering the first proposed Regulated Investment Exchange specifically for companies committed to positive social and environmental impact is a reflection not only of his persistence and ambition — but also of how far we have come in recognising the important role that business and finance have to play in driving forward solutions to global challenges.
We were thrilled to congratulate Kromek Group Plc for winning the Impact Company of the Year for its radiation detection solutions which use sensor technology to enable the identification of cancerous tissues and hazardous materials. In the words of Chief Executive Dr Arnab Basu,
“Our mission is to make the lives of people safer — whether that’s helping to detect a dirty bomb or other radiological threat, keeping them safe while travelling, or through the early diagnosis of diseases such as osteoporosis, dementia and cancer. We want to enable our customers and the end users of our technology to take more effective decisions based on superior information, which ultimately leads to increased operational efficiency and lower costs.”
With Project Heather looking for companies who have a clear purpose to create a positive impact for people or environment at the core of their business, it is companies with powerful mission statements such as this who we consider our ideal potential issuers. Indeed, we were also impressed by Walls & Futures, the ‘Ethical Housing Real Estate Investment Trust’ which focuses on long-term, secure income by addressing the UK’s social housing needs.
Finally, we extend our congratulations to all other winners at the Small Cap Awards last night:
IPO of the Year — Cake Box Holdings Plc
Company of the Year — Beeks Financial Cloud Group Plc
NEX Exchange Company of the Year — National Milk Records Plc
Executive Director of the Year — Mike Creedon, CEO — Scientific Digital Imaging Plc
Analyst of the Year — George O’Connor, Technology, Stifel Nicolaus Europe Limited
Journalist of the Year — Simon Thompson— Investors Chronicle
Fund Manager of the Year — Marlborough Nano Cap Growth
Lifetime Achievement Award — Andrew Buchanan
A huge congratulations to the Small Cap UK Network for its ongoing passion to design events which facilitate engagement and enable leaders and participants in the micro-cap sector to meet, collaborate and succeed together. We look forward to the day when there is no longer the need for ‘Impact Company of the Year’ as Impact becomes the new Business As Usual.
