Michael Wilson, president and chief executive officer of Agrium, addresses staff and shareholders at the company's annual general meeting in Calgary, May 7, 2008.TODD KOROL/Reuters
Amid a swirling spring snowstorm, an assistant in Agrium Ltd.'s investor relations department decided to work from home to avoid a drive on the slippery highway between her home south of Calgary and the company office in the city.
Going to work might have been easier.
Thursday morning, she attempted to send out an announcement by e-mail to the people on Agrium's investor-information list about an upcoming investors conference.
On the first go, the system randomly attached a one-page PDF that had the work history of an Agrium employee.
A second try six minutes later worked with the proper PDF attached. But a third e-mail 40 minutes thereafter that apologized for the confusion, blaming an "IT issue," went out with another PDF randomly attached by the system.
This PDF, like the others, looked innocuous, entitled: "AN 010-004 Agrium to present at Investor Conference."
But the file - when opened, stamped "restricted & confidential" in capped red letters - contained partial first-quarter financial information that wasn't supposed to be issued until next Wednesday.
Agrium yesterday quickly realized its mistake. The company immediately alerted its lawyers, the Toronto Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange.
By mid-afternoon in Toronto and New York, Agrium put out a terse press release titled "inadvertent release of information" that stated that it had accidentally released key information: sales, gross profit and EBITDA of Agrium's wholesale division (which last quarter accounted for about half of Agrium's business). Though Agrium didn't say it, sales for the division were up 14 per cent from a year ago.
While rare, technology gremlins have struck in similar ways before. Five years ago, Petro-Canada and CNW Group briefly published the French version of the company's second-quarter results online a day and a half early before yanking it back. The document revealed a dividend increase and a share split that hadn't yet technically been approved by Petrocan's board.
As Agrium worked on its press release yesterday, the stock wasn't halted because the financial information in the accidentally released PDF wasn't considered material, according to an assessment by Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada, which conducts market surveillance for the TSX.
"Big screw-up - I feel sorry for them," said independent industry analyst Chris Damas. He said he had never seen the level of detail provided in the PDF - Agrium broke down sales and profit by various sites where the company operates - but at the same time the figures were not massively revealing.
The stock was mostly unaffected. After the accidental release, which occurred at 11:28 a.m. ET, the stock barely budged, floating between $62 and $62.50 on light trading volume. There was a pop to about $64 just before the official press release but Agrium and the TSX noted that stock of industry rival Potash Corp. was also rising at the same time, just after Potash completed its first-quarter conference call.
Agrium as of yesterday afternoon had not yet figured out what went wrong. "The key is to find what happened with the technology and get it fixed," said Richard Downey, head of investor relations.
David Ebner