Most annual shareholder meetings aren’t very exiting, but the Solitron AGM that was held earlier this week wasn’t routine. It was the first shareholder meeting in literally decades, and the company needed some pushing to hold it in the first place. Unfortunately for me the meeting was held at the other side of the world so I was unable to attend, but multiple bloggers and other shareholders managed to find their way to Miami. Oddball Stocks has a great summary online of the meeting and his thoughts on the event.

From my point of view the meeting seems to have been a reasonable success. The original board of directors has been replaced, and while someone in the comments at Oddball Stocks mentioned that Dr. Davis seems to have been knowledgeable about the business and valuable to the company I don’t think that really matters. His first and foremost responsibility was representing the interests of shareholders.

Looking at the results of the AGM votes is also interesting and shows what the shareholder base is thinking. A potential problem with prodding management into action is that a large part of the shareholder base could be apathetic. Approximately 25% of the outstanding shares showed up as broker non-votes, so Solitron does have it’s share of these lazy shareholders. But with just 457,100 shares voting for Dr. Davis and 865,746 against it’s pretty clear that the company cannot ignore shareholders any longer. Presumably almost half of the for-votes were from the CEO, Shevach Saraf, who owns 218,155 shares. If we exclude him from the results almost 80% of shareholders voted against the incumbent directors.

Hopefully the AGM has been a wake-up call for the company and something positive will happen. If not, I can sleep well at night knowing that my fellow shareholders are willing to take action when needed.

Disclosure

Long Solitron