Last month I wrote this post concerning what I believe the term "shareholder democracy" does not mean.
In that post, I discussed current examples of interest, including: Lehman, Yahoo-Microsoft-Icahn, Citigroup-Rubin, and Anheuser-Busch & Inbev.
Yesterday's Wall Street Journal reported on two of these stories. And the silver lining is that at least one situation actually turned in shareholders' favor.
Anheuser-Busch's board is to be congratulated for doing the right thing. That is, they played somewhat harder to get, and coaxed another $5/share out of InBev before acceding to the acquisition by the larger Belgian brewer.
Despite August Busch IV's silly whinings, the board correctly understood that Busch's lackluster performance. I wrote about it here.
Chalk one up for a board that actually did its job.
Then, in contrast, we turn to this week's news out of Jerry Chang's Yahoo. I wrote here about Carl Icahn's move into Yahoo two months ago.
Despite the obvious long-term problems at Yahoo,Chang and his board's chairman, Roy Bostock, have some idiotic notion that what Terry Semel didn't do, and Jerry Yang hasn't done in a year, somehow, Yahoo will accomplish for shareholders in the future.
Meanwhile, Icahn has correctly taken advantage of Microsoft's Ballmer's wrong-headed belief that his company can somehow benefit from Yahoo's search business, and already prospectively split up the firm, once his board slate is elected.
It is truly difficult to see how, if you still own Yahoo, or bought it after Icahn did, you'd do anything but vote for Icahn's slate.
Yang and Bostock will, hopefully, be sued by some shareholders for malfeasance in this whole mess.
We see pride and obstinacy getting in the way of what is a fairly obvious and simple decision- break Yahoo up or at least let someone else try to wring some value out of it.
Of course, if you had owned Yahoo, you really should have been out of it years ago, when its performance had underrun the S&P's for a few years. To me, as I noted in my earlier post, that is the real meaning of shareholder democracy.
Sell what you don't want, inexpensively.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment