UBS AGM – Auditory Chloroform
The UBS Annual General Meeting on 3 May 2018 in the Messe Basel has been the worst so far of the Swiss company 2018 AGM season.
Both Axel Weber the Chairman and Sergio Emotti the CEO were way off their game in comparison to last year’s AGM. The texts were way too long and in places rambling.
Both Axel Weber and Sergio Emotti were at times unsteady with reading off the teleprompter and on occasion missing out chunks of text. The use of the teleprompter as an electronic cheating device for company executives needs to be challenged more, and its use harshly criticized.
If a company executive is merely going to read general meeting pabulum off Teleprompters, they may as well tape this beforehand and play it as a video at the AGM.
The AGM is the only time generally during the year when shareholders come face to face with executives from the company they jointly own. It should be the opportunity to see if an executive can form their own sentences, and think on their feet. Merely reading text that has been heavily massaged by communication experts is disrespectful to the shareholders and to the purpose of the event.
Because of this, teleprompter use must be called what it is – the sign of an executive who has deficiencies in their skill set. I have an 8 year old niece who is fluent in 3 languages and reads incredibly well. UBS and others could outsource the reading of teleprompter texts to her – at lease she would deliver the texts perfectly, accent less and every word would be clear and well enunciated. There are a few top SMI companies where the Executives do most excellently without Teleprompters.
Axel Weber made a big deal of saying that UBS is committed to Switzerland due to its stability, excellent business environment etc. etc. This was obviously damage control aimed at Sergio Emotti’s, Switzerland bashing in 2017. This is a bad habit exhibited among some CEO’s of Swiss companies, who whenever there is talk of a new regulation or tightening of some law, they try to blackmail the Swiss population by threatening to move the company out of Switzerland.
As much as Chairman Axel Weber praised UBS on a number of key points and performed some intense window dressing, it appeared that there came concerned Shareholder after Shareholder who posed a question that undermined the ascertation, with real facts, that Axel Weber had tried so hard to make.
Sustainability: Actares pointed to UBS investing in companies that seriously damaged the environment.
Transparency: A shareholder wanted to have an overview of paid and pending fines due to UBS misbehaviour over the past decade. A perfect opportunity to display the UBS’s real transparency in action. Instead Axel Weber went into beast mode and was clearly angered by questioner and the line of the question.
Chairman Axel Weber appears incredibly adept at taking a critical question and distilling the only droplet of positivism out of it and then answer the question as if it was thanking the questioner for their praise. Nice technique, but it quickly wears!
We did not wait until the end of this uninspiring meeting, and left with a lot of concerns.
