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

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

ACT said it would begin collecting electronic signatures from shareholders at 5 p.m. local time and seek support from the National Pension Service and domestic and overseas asset managers to meet the 3% 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. We are asking a basic capital-market question: who really owns a corporation?,” it said in a statement, saying the campaign aims to help 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,” it said.

The proposed meeting could consider a proposal to approve a 45.5 trillion won ($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% of operating profit for special bonuses for chip division employees as part of a wage deal that averted a major strike. 

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.

($1 = 1,431.3500 won)

(Reporting by Hyunjoo Jin; Editing by Saad Sayeed)