Corporate Reputation Management in the Post Truth Era and the Age of Fake News
February 12, 2025
E Commerce is growing day by day in both B2B and B2C context. Retailing industry including Fashion Retail and Grocery retailing have caught on to the bandwagon and have begun to offer E trading or Online Shopping. In the early 1990s we saw Companies setting up websites with very little understanding of E Commerce and […]
You’ve got your business up and running. There’s just a problem. You’re not bringing in enough money. This is a guide for Business-to-Business (B2B) marketing in 2024 and beyond to help you do just that – and perhaps, along the way, refine and smooth out ambiguities in your business offering too. While marketing tools and […]
As an affiliate, one of the first major decisions that need to be made is selecting an affiliate program. This program then forms the basis of all the time and money that the affiliate would spend trying to generate a sustainable income. You cannot win too often if the playing field is unfavorable! Choosing the […]
Today every company needs to advertise its product to inform the customers about the product, increase the sales, acquire market value, and gain reputation and name in the industry. Every business spends lot of money for advertising their products but the money spent will lead to success only when the best techniques of advertising are […]
At core of building brand equity is marketing programs or strategies. Marketing activities can facilitate in increasing brand awareness as well as in creating the right brand image. Marketing activities can be weaved around product, pricing and distribution channel. But the way these marketing activities are carried out has gone under revolutionary change owing to […]
Any public limited or private limited company has shareholders who contribute capital towards the setting up and running of the company. While in the case of private limited companies, the shareholders are usually the promoters and a few close friends or family, the public limited companies have a large body of shareholders drawn from all walks of life.
The shareholders of any company have a responsibility to ensure that the company is well run and well managed. They do this by monitoring the performance of the company and raising their objections or giving their approval to the actions of the management of the company. Whereas many shareholders act through institutional and large investors as their representatives, minority shareholders have the option of expressing either their disapproval or agreement at the Annual General Meetings of the companies.
The concept of having shareholders for the companies is to make the companies accountable for their actions. As mentioned above, the shareholders are usually represented on the board of directors and the board of directors acts as the custodian for shareholder interests.
In cases where the board is not acceding to the requests of the shareholders, the shareholders can act directly by asking the management to convene an extraordinary general meeting so that they can voice their opinions.
In past, the Indian IT bellwether, Infosys has been facing the heat from the shareholders because of its huge cash reserves where the shareholders have demanded that the company buyback some of the shares to compensate for the declining dividends and falling stock prices.
In the West, shareholder activism is usually in the form of putting pressure on the board and the management to take decisions that are in line with environmental, social and ethical norms and this is reflected in the way the global multinational, Vedanta, was forced to drop some controversial projects in India because its shareholders in the UK objected to this on humanitarian grounds.
The point here is that left to themselves, the managements of companies might act in ways that would enhance their personal benefit at the expense of the company. This is where shareholders play a crucial role in mediating between the agency problems and issues of conflict of interest along with asymmetries of information.
For instance, in the recent past, the Public Sector Coal India has been forced to explain several of the decisions taken by its management and the board of directors because of objections raised by the shareholders. The examples that have been cited in this article point to the fact that shareholders can indeed influence the outcomes that the board and the management take on their behalf.
Further, shareholders have a responsibility towards society as well since the companies that they have invested in cannot be allowed to flout ethical and social norms. Hence, the responsibilities of shareholders are many and varied and some of them have been touched upon in this article.
In conclusion, shareholders are increasingly demanding a greater say in the conduct of the companies where they have invested and this is a good sign.
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