Apple shareholders voted Friday to require an audit looking into whether the company’s policies have a negative impact on the civil rights of its employees and customers.
Apple’s Board of Directors opposed the idea, claiming the company is already committed to respecting civil rights.
A small group of Apple investors think the company isn’t doing enough to improve its racial and gender diversity quotas, and suggest that Apple needs to step up its pace.
For the second time, investor Tony Maldonado has filed a shareholder proposal asking Apple to, “adopt an accelerated recruitment policy … to increase the diversity of senior management and its board of directors.”
It seems Apple disagrees, though.
Apple CEO Tim Cook received less pay in 2016 as a result of the company missing revenue and profit goals.
In a new filing with the SEC, Apple revealed that other top executives also got less compensation for 2016 as well. Cook only took home $8.7 million last year after being paid $10.2 million in in 2015.
Apple is known as one of the most environmentally conscious companies in the world, but some shareholders think the company needs to to a lot more if it hopes to meet the aggressive goals set by the Paris Agreement last year.
Boston-based investment firm Jantz Management has filed a resolution for Apple shareholders that would request that the Board of Directors reveal on plan to shareholders by June 2016 on how Apple plans to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emission status for its facilities and major suppliers by 2030.
Apple could be forced to add more non-white executives and directors, due to a proposal put forward by an investor who thinks the current makeup of Apple execs is “a little bit too vanilla.”
The possible pro-diversity push was reportedly prompted after the son of investor Antonio Avian Maldonado II, who owns just 645 Apple shares, asked why nearly everyone on Apple’s board of directors was white.
Proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) has recommended that shareholders vote against Carl Icahn’s share buyback proposal for Apple.
According to the ISS report, “[The Apple board] has returned the bulk of its U.S.-generated cash to shareholders via aggressive stock buybacks and dividends payouts. In light of these good-faith efforts and its past stewardship, the board’s latitude should not be constricted by a shareholder resolution that would micromanage the company’s capital allocation process.”
Apple’s quarterly profit probably fell for the first time in over a decade, thanks to new products with lower profit margins and a slowing demand for the iPhone, Bloomberg reports. Fourteen analysts have reduced their estimates for Apple in recent weeks, and on Friday, the Cupertino company’s share price fell below $400 for the first time since December 2011.
At today’s Apple Shareholders Meeting, CEO Tim Cook admitted that Apple was “looking at new product categories” but that the company had no interest in just “pressing a button or two” to have Apple make the most products.
Rumors are swirling that Apple, a company which has been having a rocky time on Wall Street lately despite reporting their most profitable quarter ever, might announce a decision to issue a stock split tomorrow at their next shareholder meeting, to be held tomorrow.
Greenlight Capital is suing Apple in an effort to get Apple to send back more of its $137 billion cash reserves in the form of shareholder dividends. Apple took this fairly seriously, and issued a press release explaining where they were at on the issue, including the fact that the Cupertino-based company has already given shareholders $10 billion of a planned $45 billion in cash.
Today, however, a judge in the US Court for the Southern District of New York approved a request by both parties in the suit to move the timetable for a response, with Apple planning to file by the end of the day this coming Wednesday, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
In a letter to shareholders posted today on the Microsoft Investor website, Steve Ballmer, current CEO of Microsoft, said something surprising.
His comments in the annual letter suggest that Microsoft may take a page out of the Apple playbook and start building its own phones based on the upcoming Surface tablet PCs, similarly to the other hardware made by the Redmond-based tech giant, the XBox 360.
Sprint CEO Dan Hesse has handed back $3.25 million of his own salary in a bid to appease shareholders who have been upset by the carrier’s iPhone deal with Apple. Shareholders spoke out against the arrangement when it was discovered that Sprint did not consider the financial effect of carrying the iPhone when it calculated employee bonuses.
The conference call announced for 9 a.m. this morning hasn’t even happened yet, and Apple’s already announced what they are doing with the cash: initiating a $10 billion share repurchase plan, as well as issue dividends and make strategic investments. All told, they expect to spend $45 billion over the next three years.
We’ll give you more details when the call starts, but for now, here’s the press release.
A potentially major coup has happened at today’s Apple Annual Shareholder Meeting: ignoring the request of Cupertino itself, Apple’s shareholders have approved a measure that now requires a majority vote for the approval of new Board Directors.
That’s big. For the first time, any new appointment to Apple’s Board of Directors will require that the shareholders approve in majority any new appointee. That gives the shareholders a lot more power over the company’s future… and could potentially lead to some interesting power struggles down the road.
