An Interim Report On Virtual Annual Meetings

Guess what? It’s been nine years since the first “virtual only” annual meeting…at Inforte - And thanks to Broc Romanek for tracking down this bit of history and to Dominic Jones, who writes the IR Web Report, www.irwebreport.com for bringing the history up to date:

Since then, as Jones reported recently, Herman Miller, Inc., Adaptec, CIBER and ICU Medical also hosted virtual-only meet- ings…And last year, we reported extensively on the Intel meeting, which was a “hybrid meeting” - that still allowed sharehold- ers to attend in person - and on Broadridge Financial Solutions’ own meeting – which was “virtual only” – both of which used Broadridge technology to allow on-line real-time voting while the meeting was in progress.

Since then, two other companies – Connexant Systems and Warner Music Group have used the Broadridge platform for V-Ms and at least four other companies will go virtual-only later this season – Artio Global Investors, Illumina, PICO Holdings and Winland Electronics.

Several other companies – such as Best Buy, American Water Works and Charles Schwab have announced that they will host “hybrid meetings” this season, with real-time voting. Also worth noting, Wells Fargo Shareowner Services has launched the first virtual-meeting/live-voting platform to compete with the Broadridge offering. Street-name holders will have to get a Legal Proxy from Broadridge, however, and send it to Wells Fargo in advance, in order to vote online.

But in the meantime, Walden Asset Management told both Intel and Broadridge that they would face shareholder pro- posals to prohibit “virtual only” meetings - based on the fear that while neither of them would abuse the virtual-only for- mat to stifle investor participation, other companies might well do so.

The good news, however, is that Walden’s Tim Smith does realize that V-Ms can be a big plus for companies – and for investors too – under the right circumstances:

As Intel’s Cary Klafter pointed out, far more people attended last year’s meeting virtually than attended in person…and more votes were cast too than there would have been without the real-time voting feature. And as we have been pointing out, a huge and rapidly increasing number of annual meeting have “virtually no one” – and often literally no one - other than management people, lawyers and Inspectors - present in person. So what a huge waste of time and money to rent a hall!