Handelsblatt, 23.10.2006

Good Management – Good Rating

That there is a direct link between the quality of a company's human capital and its long-term business success is something not many professionals would argue about. However, what many fail to recognize is that management quality influences the stock market rating and thus indirectly the cost of refinancing the company on the (debt) capital market. Besides hard, quantitative rating factors, all three of the globally operating ratings agencies include soft, qualitative rating factors – sometimes weighted at more than 50 percent – in their ratings analyses. Apart from the company's strategy, the most important of the soft rating factors is the quality of its management.