Promoting communication with investors as the core of investor relations
General Shareholders Meeting
IR Communication
In an effort to make our shareholders meeting more open and easier for shareholders to attend, we at OMRON schedule meetings at least three working days before the day on which shareholders meetings of other companies are concentrated. We also use a conveniently located hotel at the JR Kyoto Station as a venue.
To give shareholders more time to prepare for the meeting, which is strongly requested especially by institutional investors, the printed convocation notice for the ordinary general meeting of shareholders in June 2023 was forwarded to shareholders 27 days before the meeting. Even prior to this, the convocation notice was posted on our website and other sites 36 days before the meeting.
For improved shareholder convenience, we have adopted an electronic voting system, which allows shareholders to exercise their voting rights via PC, smartphone, or other mobile devices, in addition to exercise by postal mail. We have also been participating in the Electronic Voting Platform, so that institutional investors in Japan and abroad can quickly access documents for the general meeting and smoothly exercise voting rights.
Should institutional investors who hold shares in street names express, in advance of the general shareholders meeting, an interest in exercising voting rights at the meeting, we will consult with the trust bank and/or custodial institutions over this possibility. Should such institutional investor(s) desire to observe the general shareholders meeting, such admission will be accepted after the investor(s) undergo specified procedures.
The annual general meeting of shareholders held in June 2023 was under normal conditions for the first time in four years with no restrictions on in-person attendance after the influence of COVID-19 since 2020. We expected a large number of shareholders to come over the meeting venue to propose an agenda for the election of directors leading to the change of representative directors and the chairman of the board of directors. After the meeting, the new president held a briefing session on management policy to strengthen interaction with shareholders. We also held an informal gathering with shareholders and management. As a result of advance announcements of these events, the number of shareholders who came over to the venue almost doubled from last year to 158. The ratio of voting rights exercised was 86.4% due to continued requests for the exercise of voting rights in advance.
At this general meeting of shareholders, we continued to respond to questions submitted to our website in advance. We made greater use of the internet for shareholders not physically at the meeting. Our convocation notice also provided detailed information regarding the acceptance of questions in advance and the online broadcast of the proceedings. Of the 119 individuals who viewed the live stream, 92 (77%) participated from areas outside Kyoto Prefecture. In this way, online participants, too, were able to view the entire meeting from beginning to end.
Going forward, OMRON will continue striving to organize a more open and constructive shareholders meeting by reflecting feedback from shareholders.
With our investor relations basic policy to communicate interactively with shareholders and investors through engagement, we at OMRON are working to provide timely and accurate information on the company's business conditions and management policies. We also aim to reflect their opinions and requests on our management strategies in order to maximize corporate value.
Specifically, in order to engage in productive communications leading to enhanced corporate value, we are committed to actions leading to stronger relations with target investors. We are also working harder on activities that target individual investors and ESG investors. For individual investors, we offer information online to increase the number of “fan” shareholders. For ESG investors, we provide information on our corporate websites, hold briefing meetings, and conduct individual interviews. Through these efforts we communicate our progress in sustainability goals related to the environment, human resources, human rights, and other areas. We provide feedback gained through dialogue to management for greater progress in these initiatives.
We resumed some of the face-to-face activities that had been suspended due to the pandemic in fiscal 2022. We also conducted activities using a web conferencing system. As a result, we had nearly 600 meetings in fiscal 2022 as opportunities for dialogue with institutional investors.
We have used the knowledge learned from this engagement to improve our management initiatives. We will continue to engage actively in dialogues and strive to achieve improved corporate value reflecting this feedback.
To support interactive communication with shareholders and investors, we disclose information on our product development and sales activities, as well as our business performance using various tools, including IR website.
Specifically, our IR website offers a wide range of data to help better understand OMRON, such as materials for investors and integrated reports. Not only does the site carry the documents about strategies and performance, but it also offers streaming videos.
To ensure timely and appropriate disclosure and to minimize information divide between investors in Japan and abroad, we post financial statements and other related information online, in English and Japanese at the same time.
In addition, to respond to the international society's growing interest in the realization of sustainable society, we are actively working to better offer non-financial information on our sustainability website.
