Gouvernance | Page 141

mission et composition du conseil d'administration Nouvelles diverses

Rachat d’actions : une pratique discutable

Ivan Tchotourian 11 avril 2016

Bonjour à toutes et à tous, voici que le rachat d’actions refait surface : la saison des résultats du premier trimestre 2016 qui démarre la semaine prochaine devrait selon un article de Les affaires confirmer cette tendance d’autant que les 500 grosses entreprises américaines sont assises sur 1300 milliards de dollars américains de trésorerie (« Wall Street dorlote ses actionnaires à coup de milliards », 10 avril 2016).

Voici quelques statistiques extraits de cet article :

En 2014 et 2015, «au moins 20% des 500 entreprises composant l’indice boursier S&P ont réduit d’au moins 4% le nombre de leurs actions, et par conséquent augmenté leurs bénéfices par action d’au moins 4%», a calculé Howard Silverblatt, analyste chez S&P Dow Jones Indices.

Les 500 plus grosses entreprises cotées en Bourse aux États-Unis avaient consacré 27,5% des 500 milliards de dollars de leurs bénéfices opérationnels aux rachats d’actions en 2009, selon S&P Dow Jones.

En 2015, cette proportion a plus que doublé: sur les 885,29 milliards de dollars de bénéfices engrangés en 2015, 572,5 milliards ont été redistribués aux actionnaires sous forme de rachats d’actions, soit 64,7%, dopant les bénéfices par action de 3,22% en moyenne.

À la prochaine…

Ivan Tchotourian

engagement et activisme actionnarial mission et composition du conseil d'administration Normes d'encadrement normes de droit

Vote majoritaire : un moyen de rendre le CA plus responsable ?

Ivan Tchotourian 5 avril 2016

Un peu de lecture pour ce matin ? Je vous renvoie à cet intéressant article : Stephen Choi, New York University Jill Fisch, University of Pennsylvania and ECGI Marcel Kahan, New York University and ECGI Edward Rock, University of Pennsylvania, « Does Majority Voting Improve Board Accountability? », Law Working Paper No. 310/2016, March 2016.

Directors have traditionally been elected by a plurality of the votes cast. This means that in uncontested elections, a candidate who receives even a single vote is elected. Proponents of “shareholder democracy” have advocated a shift to a majority voting rule in which a candidate must receive a majority of the votes cast to be elected. Over the past decade, they have been successful, and the shift to majority voting has been one of the most popular and successful governance reforms. Yet critics are skeptical as to whether majority voting improves board accountability. Tellingly, directors of companies with majority voting rarely fail to receive majority approval – even more rarely than directors of companies with plurality voting. Even when such directors fail to receive majority approval, they are unlikely to be forced to leave the board. This poses a puzzle: why do firms switch to majority voting and what effect does the switch have, if any, on director behavior?

We empirically examine the adoption and impact of a majority voting rule using a sample of uncontested director elections from 2007 to 2013. We test and find partial support for four hypotheses that could explain why directors of majority voting firms so rarely fail to receive majority support: selection; deterrence/accountability; electioneering by firms; and restraint by shareholders.

Our results further suggest that the reasons for and effects of adopting majority voting may differ between early and later adopters. We find that early adopters of majority voting were more shareholder-responsive than other firms even before they adopted majority voting. These firms seem to have adopted majority voting voluntarily, and the adoption of majority voting has made little difference in their responsiveness to shareholders responsiveness going forward. By contrast, for late adopters, we find no evidence that they were more shareholder-responsive than other firms before they adopted majority voting, but strong evidence that they became more responsive after adopting majority voting.

Differences between early and late adopters can have important implications for understanding the spread of corporate governance reforms and evaluating their effects on firms. Reform advocates, rather than targeting the firms that, by their measures, are most in need of reform, instead seem to have targeted the firms that are already most responsive. They may then have used the widespread adoption of majority voting to create pressure on the nonadopting firms.

Empirical studies of the effects of governance changes thus need to be sensitive to the possibility that early adopters and late adopters of reforms differ from each other and that the reforms may have different effects on these two groups of firms.

À la prochaine…

Ivan Tchotourian