Samsung’s retail investors seek extra shareholder meeting over buybacks, bonuses

[SEOUL] South Korean retail shareholder platform ACT said on Tuesday (Aug 4) that it had launched a campaign to call an extraordinary shareholders’ meeting at Samsung Electronics, urging the chipmaker to buy back about US$32 billion worth of shares and set limits on performance bonuses.

ACT said it would begin collecting electronic signatures from shareholders at 5 pm local time and seek support from the National Pension Service and domestic and overseas asset managers to meet the 3 per cent ownership threshold required to call the meeting.

The move comes after Samsung shares lost over one-third of their value since hitting record highs in June, despite the artificial intelligence boom.

The falls were driven by a sharp wave of deleveraging and renewed skepticism regarding the durability of AI infrastructure spending.

“This is not simply an expression of dissatisfaction over a falling share price,” ACT said in a statement. “We are asking a basic capital-market question: Who really owns a corporation?”

It added that the campaign is aimed at helping the company become a shareholder-friendly company. “Retail shareholders are like a company’s fan club: They praise it when it performs well and take out the stick when it does not.”

The proposed meeting could consider a proposal to approve a 45.5 trillion won (US$31.79 billion) share buyback programme, it said.

A second proposal would seek to require shareholder approval for an upper limit on performance bonuses tied to company operating profit.

In May, Samsung agreed to assign 10.5 per cent of operating profit for special bonuses for chip division employees as part of a wage deal that averted a major strike.

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ACT said such bonuses could amount to hundreds of billions of dollars over a decade, and argued that rules governing payouts of that scale should not be set solely by the board.

Samsung Electronics did not immediately respond to a request for comment. REUTERS