Today is the mathematical apex of annual-meeting season, those few months where corporate America comes face to face with its shareholders. According to Institutional Shareholder Services, 237 companies — or nearly 5% of all U.S.-listed firms — will hold their annual meetings today, the most of any day all year.
Among them are CBS Corp. (at its Hollywood television studios), Facebook Inc. (at the posh Sofitel hotel in downtown San Francisco), McDonald’s Corp. (in the “Prairie Ballroom” of its Oak Brook, Ill. headquarters) and JetBlue (virtually, here), according to regulatory filings.
Proxy season — named for the proxy forms that shareholders use to cast their votes — typically gets going in mid-April and runs through mid-June.Thousands of U.S. public companies will hold their annual meeting in that window, according to ISS.
Few will feature any fireworks. Most annual meetings are sparsely attended affairs where boards run through obligatory votes on executive pay packages and the hiring of auditors.
Still, a handful of today’s meetings promise at least some tension.
At Colorado-based Solera National Bancorp, shareholders will choose between incumbents and a slate put up by the bank’s largest shareholder, who is seeking to put himself, his 28-year-old fiancée and five other nominees to the board. At the parent company of Illinois-based Harvard Savings Bank, an activist is running Mark S. Saladin, a local lawyer, for a single board seat.
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And hedge fund Western Investment LLC is seeking control of Anworth Mortgage Asset Corp., a real-estate investment trust that mostly buys bonds secured by government-backed home loans. If it wins, Western has said it will liquidate the company, which has traded below the value of the loans it holds.
UPDATE: And earlier version of this article said Jason Kalisman was seeking a seat at Endeavour International Corp. His nomination was withdrawn just before the meeting.
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