Samsung's retail investors seek extra shareholder meeting over buybacks, bonuses

Reuters

Tue, August 4, 2026 astatine 3:54 AM CDT 2 min read

SEOUL, Aug 4 (Reuters) - South Korean retail shareholder level ACT said connected Tuesday it had launched a run to telephone an bonzer ‌shareholders' gathering astatine Samsung Electronics, urging the chipmaker to bargain backmost astir $32 ‌billion worthy of shares and acceptable limits connected show bonuses.

ACT said it would statesman collecting physics ​signatures from shareholders astatine 5 p.m. section clip and question enactment from the National Pension Service and home and overseas plus managers to conscionable the 3% ownership threshold required to telephone the meeting.

The determination comes aft Samsung shares mislaid implicit ‌one 3rd of their worth ⁠since hitting record-highs successful June, contempt the artificial quality boom. The falls were driven by a crisp question of deleveraging ⁠and renewed skepticism regarding the durability of AI infrastructure spending.

"This is not simply an look of dissatisfaction implicit a falling stock price. We are asking a basal capital-market ​question: ​who truly owns a corporation?," it said ​in a statement, saying the run ‌aims to assistance the institution go a shareholder-friendly company.

"Retail shareholders are similar a company's instrumentality club: they praise it erstwhile it performs good and instrumentality retired the instrumentality erstwhile it does not," it said.

The projected gathering could see a connection to o.k. a 45.5 trillion won ($31.79 billion) stock buyback programme, it said.

A ‌second connection would question to necessitate shareholder ​approval for an precocious bounds connected show bonuses ​tied to institution operating profit.

In ​May, Samsung agreed to delegate 10.5% of operating nett for ‌special bonuses for spot part employees arsenic ​part of a ​wage woody that averted a large strike.

ACT said specified bonuses could magnitude to hundreds of billions of dollars implicit a decade, and argued that ​rules governing payouts of ‌that standard should not beryllium acceptable solely by the board.

Samsung Electronics ​did not instantly respond to a petition for comment.

($1 = 1,431.3500 won)

(Reporting ​by Hyunjoo Jin; Editing by Saad Sayeed)