Domestic and International Institutional Equity Sales

Institutional equity sales professionals are dedicated to helping our global institutional investor clients identify superior investment opportunities. Our 37 sales professionals, who have extensive experience with the firm, believe that personal contact and the exchange of ideas are essential to success in the capital markets. Group presentations, meetings, field trips, and seminars are among the tools that facilitate the flow of information between corporate issuers and investors. We organized more than 240 investor trips globally in 2007, resulting in 2,000-plus one-on-one meetings between institutional investors and corporate management teams.

William Blair & Company first established a European presence in the institutional marketplace in the 1960s, and ever since has provided international investors with access to beneficial information and investment opportunities not readily available in their local markets.

We maintain offices or affiliates in Chicago, Boston, Hartford, London, New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, and Zurich.

Our salespeople draw on the ideas of our highly esteemed Equity Research Department, whose mission is to generate superior investment ideas and value-added insights through independent, in-depth research of quality growth companies across the market-cap spectrum (but focused on small- and midcap stocks), with a longer-term orientation. Our research universe totals more than 370 quality growth companies in 5 industry sectors: business services, consumer, financial services, health care, and technology.

Together with Institutional Sales and Trading, the Equity Research Department co-sponsors the William Blair & Company Annual Growth Stock Conference, a three-day event featuring presentations by senior management from a wide spectrum of industries and market capitalizations. Our 2008 Growth Stock Conference attendees, which totaled 881 clients, were rewarded with presentations from 198 companies. Our conference continues to attract presenters from the most senior ranks of management, as more than 80% of the presenters in 2008 were COOs, presidents, CEOs, and chairmen. We are excited and looking forward to our 29th Annual Growth Stock Conference which will be held June 9th-11th, 2009.