“Shareholder meetings at Apple are a lot like city council meetings in, say, Berkeley, Calif. Forget about dollars and cents; meetings like this are a prime opportunity for earnest activists, angry cranks, mutants and the overly concerned to bask in some attention. For public companies, the game is simple: Let them talk, smile politely and don’t let the freaks shake anything loose,” Brian Caulfield reports for Forbes.
“Mission accomplished, mostly. Activist investors used the meeting as a forum to advocate proposals to allow shareholders to vote on executive compensation; increase the ‘transparency’ of Apple’s environmental practices; adopt ‘principles for health care reform,’ pushed by the AFL-CIO; and, from the Teamsters of all people, provide more details on Apple’s political contributions. The result: After a preliminary tally, all four proposals were voted down, and Apple’s board of directors were re-elected,” Caulfield reports.
“Shareholder Shelton Ehrlich [at one point] declared, ‘These people are all socialists. They are all trying to make us slaves to the government,'” Caulfield reports. “Other shareholders stood up to poke Apple’s management team about diversity, protest Apple’s departure from the annual Macworld conference and more. An activist from the Parents Research Council, after noting that she drove two and a half hours to attend the meeting, gave those attending a detailed description of a raunchy scene from the sitcom Two and a Half Men, which is on the air, in part, thanks to commercials from Apple.”
“Cook promised to look into it. ‘If it’s not on ESPN, I probably won’t see it personally,’ he added,” Caulfield reports. “Cook thanked shareholders for the comments and stuck to the facts. Apple sold 9.8 million Macs last year and 13.7 million iPhones. The company’s net income of $4.8 billion in 2008 was 18 times what it was four years earlier. Translation: Your concerns are welcome, but we’re doing pretty good here, guys.”
There’s more, mainly handwringing over Jobs absence (which we attribute, drum roll please… to his current leave of absence – shocking, we know), in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Once again, our proposal for 23.71% of building exteriors on the Apple campus to be painted “Blue Dalmatian” with the remainder to be airbrushed “Flower Power” failed miserably.
