Mark your calendars, readers, for May 20th – and plan to tune in the Intel Annual Meeting (at 8:30 a.m. Pacific time) for the world’s first-ever “virtual annual meeting of shareholders” – which will feature on-line, real-time voting – right up until the Inspector of Election determines that the polls are closed. Intel investors will also have the ability to ask questions, real-time, over the Internet.
This is the beginning of a totally new approach to Annual Meetings, and one that will ultimately result in a totally new A-M paradigm, we think.
As the online Notice of Meeting tells us, Intel has moved the meeting into one of its own buildings this year, to save the expense of renting a public hall. And, to underscore the new approach, they won’t be serving refreshments this year either. They are also limiting admission to shareholders only – and tightening up the admission procedures to require proof of share ownership, or possession of a valid proxy from the holder, or from the holders’ bank or broker to get in if the shares are held in street name; something a great many other companies are also doing this season.
The biggest innovation – and a real game-changer, we think – is the on-line, real-time voting feature, which we think just may encourage more voting by individual investors, who have been voting less and less faithfully with every passing year.
Intel’s online meeting materials make an exceptionally strong case for the “virtual meeting-material delivery methods” they’ve been pioneering…and the incredibly positive impact on the environment their methods have had. Here’s an excerpt – a footnote to the Chairman’s letter in this year’s meeting package - and on the Notice and Access model in particular:
** Prior to using the “Notice and Access” model, Intel printed slightly over 4 million copies of SEC materials annually. Once we started using Notice and Access, we reduced our annual printing by over 3.5 million copies to approximately 400,000 copies. During the past two years, Intel has eliminated the printing of more than 7 million copies, equivalent to nearly 300 million pages of paper, saving the company more than $4.5 million in printing and postage costs. Environmentally, the 300 million pages not used to print Intel’s SEC materials avoids the generation of approximately 8 million pounds of CO2 equivalent and over 26 million gallons of wastewater. These environmental impact estimates were made using the Environmental Defense Fund Paper Calculator. For more information, visit www.papercalculator.org.
Even more impressive to us , however, is the impact on our landfills: Just take one second to imagine how big a pile of paper ultimately lands in the landfill when 7 million A-Rs, proxy statements, proxy cards and VIFs – and usually the envelopes too – a mind-boggling 300 million pages in all - get trucked to the dump!
Interestingly, Intel’s environmental impact statements very much changed our minds about the merits of driving to a meeting simply to attend “in person”: Activist investors have long said they won’t tolerate a “totally virtual” Annual Meeting…and, after all, the meeting does have to be held somewhere , as Intel’s will be. Activists, of cour se, want to be able to “grill” the leadership team, if they feel a grilling is called for. And the preparation that management teams do in anticipation of such grillings is, as we’ve often noted here, something of a good-governance-insurance mechanism in and of itself. But Intel’s long history of good-governance makes them less susceptible to public “grillings” in the first place.
So would we drive to an Annual Meeting when we could attend via the internet and save all that we had an axe to grind, we’d have to say. Or if we were attending in an official capacity.
Also very much worth noting as we get set for the “season”, Intel’s approach to E-Delivery of their annual meeting materials is still the gold standard: Every bit as good as having a really good hard copy in hand would be, and even easier to skim, we have to say, …Far, far better reading than most of the paper-packages we get from other companies – and light years ahead of the nearly impenetrable e-Proxy packages that most companies post these days.
When E-Delivery first took flight, we predicted that “writing for the web” would FORCE companies to produce materials that were far better organized, much briefer and far more to the point. Sadly, with the exception of Intel, and a still small handful of other web-savvy companies, this has not yet come true. But if YOU would like to get closer to the gold standard, check out the Intel materials with care.
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