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Unsatisfactory Avast AGM, and Designated Accounts

I “attended” the Avast (AVST) Annual General Meeting today. This was of course held on-line using Zoom with only one director in physical attendance (Warren Finegold) who chaired the meeting. Zoom seems to be becoming the de facto standard for on-line meetings.

The Chairman of the company, John Schwarz, gave a brief presentation backed up by some slides. To summarise, it was another strong year of growth and profitability. A new CEO is now in place. EBITDA was up 8% with strong cash generation and hence there was a steady reduction in debt. They added 400,000 paying customers making a new total of 12.6 million. There were numerous new product releases and dividends are up 8.1%.

But nobody could raise questions at the meeting. In addition, although shareholders could submit questions in advance, these were not answered at the meeting. Overall this was a totally unsatisfactory way of conducting an on-line AGM.

Votes were taken on a poll to be declared later, but the proxy counts were quickly flashed on the screen. I noticed Belinda Richards managed to get 13.7% of the independent shareholder votes against her. I wonder why.

The whole meeting was over in 15 minutes.

Apparently customers of The Share Centre have been notified that there are new terms and conditions which cover the future use of designated nominee accounts. This will be a major step forward in investor protection and shareholder enfranchisement. Most brokers, like the Share Centre, use only “pooled” nominee accounts where your holdings are jumbled up with those of all their other customers. It relies on the brokers sorting out who owns what, which can sometimes prove to be not at all easy if a broker gets into financial difficulties. Designated accounts contain both the broker and end customer identification on the share register and hence are by far preferable.

It will be interesting to see how they support such accounts, and whether it will be affected by the proposed merger with Interactive Investor. This was approved by a vote on the 8th April but there has been no further news.

Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson  )

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