June 21, 2016
Virtual-Only Annual Meetings: Intel Dives Into the Pool!
Last year, I blogged about how Hewlett-Packard became the first big company to hold a virtual-only annual meeting. This year, Intel became the new bellwether. Intel had tried to become the first large company to do this about six years ago – but the resulting bad publicity forced them to turn the meeting into a hybrid.
Not so this year. The only bad press I saw was this NY Times piece – that didn’t come out until after the meeting was over! [By the way, the NYT piece incorrectly states that Intel held a virtual-only meeting in ’09 and that it was the first ever. Wrong on both counts – see my list of the true pioneers, starting with Inforte in 2001. The piece is also wrong in that Intel did take questions from the web during the ’16 annual meeting.]
Anyway, this is how Intel described how the meeting would work in its proxy statement – compare that to what Hewlett-Packard disclosed in this year’s proxy statement when it held a virtual-only meeting again…
In this blog, Cooley’s Cydney Posner describes a recent Financial Times article on virtual-only meetings…
– Broc Romanek