Le Wall Street Journal nous fait savoir ce matin que les entreprises japonaises aiment de plus en plus leurs actionnaires : « Corporate Japan Learns to Love Its Shareholders » (4 octobre 2019). Il y a une intéressante augmentation du rachat d’actions couplé à un engagenent actionnarial croissant.
Extrait :
Japan’s corporate governance reforms are starting to pay off, and plenty more could be coming. This is a good reason to get excited about the country’s cheap stocks, even if growth prospects aren’t exciting.
The Japanese stock market has quietly outperformed every large rich-world peer outside of the U.S. over the past decade. Much of the burst hasn’t come from a rampant economy. Growth has been solid by Japanese standards, but hardly impressive by anyone else’s.
Companies in the Topix stock index have increased their buyback activity by 164% year over year as of the end of September, according to CLSA’s Nicholas Smith. If they do intend to return more cash to shareholders, they are in a prime position to do so. Japan’s listed corporations sit on enormous piles of cash, and have significantly lower debt-to-equity ratios than their peers in either Europe or the U.S.
(…) Better REIT valuations offer just one example of what can happen when corporate-governance reforms come to fruition. According to a Goldman Sachs analysis, shareholders generally are growing more relaxed about throwing their weight around. The proportion of shareholder proposals at Japanese companies that received more than 20% support at annual general meetings this June rose to 30% from 20% last year and 12% just two years ago.
Japanese corporate culture is being blamed for the mistakes. Economists Naoshi Ikeda, Kotaro Inoue and Sho Watanabe of the Tokyo Institute of Technology recently set out to test the « quiet-life hypothesis, » which is, as Bloomberg describes, « the idea that without shareholder pressure, managers will tend to avoid big decisions and content themselves with managing stable corporate empires, letting their companies stagnate. »
The researchers found that there’s a lot of this « quiet-life » business activity going on in Japan. Cross-shareholding (Keiretsu), where corporations own each other’s stock is rife, and this means companies are reluctant to challenge each other. The researchers found that at companies with a considerable level of cross-ownership, R&D spending and growth CapEx is relatively low compared to the rest of the market.
But progress is being made. Three and a half years after the government introduced a stewardship code for local institutional investors and more than two years since the launch of a governance code for listed Japanese companies, listed companies are moving in the right direction. Dividend payouts have reached a record, and there has been a quadrupling of firms with two or more independent directors on their boards over the past four years. There has also been an increase in of “constructive,” or friendly, activists (referred to as engagement funds rather than activist funds), which aim to tackle corporate governance issues, but with an explicitly low-key, humble approach.
Le géant américain Apple, sur la sellette en Europe pour des «avantages fiscaux illégaux» perçus en Irlande, a aussi eu des soucis au Japon pour cause d’impôts impayés relatifs à des transferts d’argent vers Dublin, ont rapporté vendredi des médiaux locaux.
Les entreprises japonaises feraient-elles l’objet d’une gouvernance de type anglo-américaine ? C’est ce qu’il semble à la lecture de cet article : « Shareholders put Japan’s corporate governance to the test » (Nikkei Asian Review, 25 juin 2016).
Voici quelques extraits :
Many stockholders at security company Secom’s annual meeting Friday demanded explanations over why then-Chairman Shuji Maeda and then-President Hiroshi Ito were fired in May, despite the company’s strong performance last fiscal year. (…) Secom voluntarily created an executive nomination and compensation committee, but has not made the members’ names public. Attendees raised questions over the effectiveness of the company’s governance structure. « There’s still room for improvement in the selection process for executives, » one said.
Shareholders at Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings’ meeting the same day focused on earnings power and dividends. The chemical company had logged extraordinary losses from restructuring its petrochemical business, while return on equity fell under 5% for the year ended in March. Shareholders demanded more details over the loss, and urged the company to try to raise its stock price. (…)
Kobe Steel logged a group net loss last fiscal year, and its ROE has long remained low. Just 87.3% of shareholders voted for the proposal to retain Chairman and President Hiroya Kawasaki, down 8 percentage points from last year. (…)
Toshiba came under harsh criticism at its Wednesday meeting, with shareholders blaming the company’s top-down culture and the lack of independence at its accounting department for its bookkeeping scandal. Only 87.06% of shareholders voted to reappoint President Satoshi Tsunakawa,