News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
the fuck's an "activist investor"? No, I read the article and clicked the link, it's some "activist investment company", which still leaves the question open. Maybe I should ask "What the fuck is activist investing"?
Someone who buys significant shares of a company and leverages them to convince a coalition of other investors to demand changes.
You think a company could make better decisions, so you buy a large (but not controlling) chunk of shares. With a relatively large chunk of shares, you can then start making demands from the board and hope that other shareholders bandwagon behind you. Ideally stock price goes up as a result and then people sell higher than they bought for.
Basically people who believe they have all the answers to running a successful business, yet don't feel the need to apply that towards just running a successful business themselves.
When the solution to the problems are 'low prices sell more product' and literally every company seems to be ignoring that, maybe this is the way to finally get things moving in the right direction.
Its not that simple. Selling more product at a lower price may not result in higher profits. These companies generally don't care about sales as much as they do profits. Selling 10x the amount of product, but at break-even or a loss would be worse to the company than it is now with their declining sales. PepsiCo's problem as I see it, is PepsiCo makes only a few products (some of their minor food brands) that would actually be a necessary purchase to live. Everything else they make is a luxury that people can skip if they can't afford it.
Everyone is getting squeezed with rising costs in housing, transportation, actual food, and medical care costs that can't be skipped, so it is PepsiCo products (and brands like them) are the first things we cut out.
Requiring the company to do more than provide short term stock growth. Generally they want the company to behave somewhat responsibly or ethically. A desire to not simply maximize profits. They have to have a big chunk of stock or proxy votes since the only way they can influence the company is by removing or adding board members.
Not always, though. A lot of activist shareholders are just looking to maximize the return they get on their investment.
One recent example is an activist shareholder group that is trying to push game publisher Square Enix to focus more on maximizing profits by playing it safer and stop spending money on so many projects.
https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/square-enix-hit-with-a-brutal-100-slide-presentation-from-one-of-its-shareholders-about-alleged-mismanagement-other-shareholders-asked-to-pitch-in-with-frank-views/
Investment group buys a significant portion of stock (large enough to sway shareholder voting), then they demand changes in the company with the threat of ousting the current executives/board via their voting power. Their goal is to make the stock valuation go up, then sell off the stock for profit.
I mean, the name should make it self-explanatory, but here, I googled it for you: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/shareholderactivist.asp
Do you know what the word "activist" means? Do you know what the word "investor" means? Put the two together and you have your answer. This isn't rocket science.