Can America’s Companies Survive America’s Most Aggressive Investors?

Quel bel article d’Alana Semuels dans The Atlantic (ici) ! Cette étude revient sur la politique des fonds de couverture (hedge funds) et l’implication de leur activisme sur les politiques et les stratégies mises en place par les entreprises américaines.

Extrait :

DuPont is one of dozens of American companies that have abandoned a long-term approach to doing business after being the target of so-called activist investors. These investors buy up shares of a company and attempt to maximize the returns to their shares, usually by replacing members of the board of directors with hand-picked candidates who will push the company to cut costs. Activity by such investors has skyrocketed of late. In a 20-month stretch in 2005 and 2006, there were only 52 activist campaigns, according to John C. Coffee, a professor at Columbia University Law School. Between 2010 and early 2014, by contrast, there were 1,115 activist campaigns. “Hedge-fund activism has recently spiked, almost hyperbolically,” Coffee writes in a 2016 paper, “The Wolf at The Door: The Impact of Hedge Fund Activism on Corporate Governance.”

These campaigns are damaging to the long-term outlook of individual companies like DuPont and also to America’s economy more generally. They often result in big cuts to research and development, substantial reductions in the workforce, and a focus on outcomes—in particular short-term profit—that hurt a company’s ability to survive in the long-term. The threat of activism affects companies across the economy: Even public companies not targeted by activists often change their behavior and cut costs to avoid becoming a target. This may be one of the reasons why America is slipping in funding research and development projects when compared with other countries.

À la prochaine…

Ivan Tchotourian

Ce contenu a été mis à jour le 24 novembre 2016 à 13 h 01 min.