Why do so many AGMs have to clash?
Honda Motor, Toyota Motor and Mazda Motor all hold their shareholders’ meeting on exactly the same day.
You’re probably not interested enough in Japanese car companies to attend their annual meetings, but it would be difficult to do so anyway.
Honda Motor, Toyota Motor and Mazda Motor all hold their shareholders’ meeting on exactly the same day. That’s Japan, you may say – well, UK companies don’t do much better.
In Britain the worst days for AGM congestion in 2010 were 28 April and 6 May (yes, the latter was general election day too). On each of those dates six FTSE 100 companies chose to face their investors. As there are around 250 working days in the year and only 100 companies in the FTSE, there really is no excuse for so many meetings coinciding.
The busy day for Japanese motor groups in 2010 is 24 June – the same day as Japan Tobacco’s AGM. The country’s other big car company held its meeting the previous day. Britain may not be quite so bad in having the whole of one sector meet its investors simultaneously but financial firms Lloyds and Schroders, aero groups BAE Systems and Cobham, property companies Segro and Hammerson, plus outsourcing rivals Serco and Capita all chose the same dates this year.
How can City analysts be expected to follow all the companies in their sector if the companies’ meetings clash? The new Stewardship Code tells fund managers to attend AGMs, but it is hard to send staff sufficiently senior to ask questions if half a dozen major investments have chosen the same day. How can private shareholders – who do not receive private briefings at other times of year – maximise their one opportunity to confront directors when they are held at the same time?
These clashing meetings can be in different parts of the country – from Jersey to Edinburgh. Sometimes even non-executive directors have to miss meetings because they sit on two boards that meet at the same time.
The inability to organise meetings on different days is a regular complaint from private shareholders who can get to a meeting, but chairman seem to do nothing. Indeed, the concentration of dates is worsening. Partly the problem is that AGMs are scheduled to suit directors’ diaries rather than investors’ or analysts’: that’s why no FTSE 100 company has an annual meeting in August or September and it is rare to have one on a Monday or Friday.
Sorting our Japan may take longer, but some agency – the council that produces the corporate governance and stewardship codes, for instance, or the Group of 100 finance directors – should assume ownership of this problem and solve it.
