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4/29/2029

Shareholder Activism in Asia Drives Global Total to Record High

Nikkei Asia (04/29/29) Shikata, Masayuki

Activist shareholders had their busiest year on record in 2024, with the Asia-Pacific region making up a fifth of campaigns worldwide, pushing some companies higher in the stock market and spurring others to consider going private. The worldwide tally of activist campaigns rose by six to 258, up by half from three years earlier, according to data from financial advisory Lazard. Campaigns in the Asia-Pacific tripled over that period to 57, growing about 30% on the year. Japan accounted for more than 60% of the regional total with 37, an all-time high. Activity is picking up this year as well in the run-up to general shareholders meetings in June. South Korea saw 14 campaigns, a jump of 10 from 2023. Critics say South Korean conglomerates are often controlled by minority investors that care too little about other shareholders. Australia and Hong Kong saw increases of one activist campaign each. North America made up half the global total, down from 60% in 2022 and 85% in 2014. Europe had 62 campaigns last year. The upswing in Japan has been fueled by the push for corporate governance reform since 2013 and the Tokyo Stock Exchange's 2023 call for companies to be more mindful of their share prices. The bourse has encouraged corporations to focus less on share buybacks and dividends than on steps for long-term growth, such as capital spending and the sale of unprofitable businesses. Demands for capital allocation to improve return on investment accounted for 51% of activist activity in Japan last year, significantly higher than the five-year average of 32%. U.S.-based Dalton Investments called on Japanese snack maker Ezaki Glico (2206) to amend its articles of incorporation to allow shareholder returns to be decided by investors as well, not just the board of directors. Though the proposal was rejected, it won more than 40% support, and Glico itself put forward a similar measure that was approved at the following general shareholders meeting in March. U.K.-based Palliser Capital took a stake last year in developer Tokyo Tatemono (8804) and argued that more efficient use of its capital, such as selling a cross-held stake in peer Hulic, would boost corporate value. Activist investors are increasingly seeking to lock in unrealized gains from rising land prices, reaping quick profits from property sales that can go toward dividends. Companies in the Tokyo Stock Exchange's broad Topix index had 25.88 trillion yen ($181 billion at current rates) in unrealized gains on property holdings at the end of March 2024, up about 20% from four years earlier. After buying into Mitsui Fudosan (8801) in 2024, U.S.-based Elliott Investment Management this year took a stake in Sumitomo Realty & Development (8830) and is expected to push for the developer to sell real estate holdings. This month, Dalton sent a letter to Fuji Media Holdings (4676), parent of Fuji Television, calling for it to spin off its real estate business and replace its board of directors. Activist campaigns have sparked share price rallies at some companies. Shares of elevator maker Fujitec (6406) were up roughly 80% from March 2023, when it dismissed Takakazu Uchiyama -- a member of the founding family -- as chairman under pressure from Oasis Management. The rise in demands from activists "creates a sense of tension among management, including at companies that don't receive such proposals," said Masatoshi Kikuchi, chief equity strategist at Mizuho Securities. Previously tight cross-shareholdings are being unwound, and reasonable proposals from minority investors are more likely to garner support from foreign shareholders. Some companies are going private to shield themselves from perceived pressure. Investments by buyout funds targeting mature companies in the Asia-Pacific were the highest in three years in 2024, according to Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu. Toyota Industries (6201) is considering going this route after facing pressure from investment funds last year to take steps such as dissolving a parent-child listing with a subsidiary and buying back more shares. Toyota Industries holds a 9% stake in Toyota Motor (7203). The automaker "may have proposed having [Toyota Industries] go private as a precautionary measure," said a source at an investment bank.

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1/16/2027

Dealmakers See More Retail Mergers and IPOs in 2026 After Tariffs Sidelined M&A Last Year

Reuters (01/16/27) Summerville, Abigail

Dealmakers predict an uptick in mergers and IPOs for retailers and consumer goods companies this year after punishing tariffs on imports to the United States had sidelined activity in the industry for the first half of 2025. Several national restaurant and convenience store chains are primed for IPOs, along with organic baby food company Once Upon a Farm, Hellman & Friedman-backed auto repair company Caliber Holdings, and Bob’s Discount Furniture, which is owned by Bain Capital, according to more than two dozen CEOs, M&A advisors and private equity investors who attended the ICR Conference in Orlando, Florida this week. “The number of high-quality companies that are in queue to go public in 2026 is higher than we’ve seen since 2021,” Ben Frost, Goldman Sachs' (GS) global co-head of the consumer retail group said in an interview. “The question is does that mean more will go public? If it does, private investors will see the ability to exit investments again (in a) regular way, which will help (private equity) activity.” Frost was one of the more than 3,000 attendees at the annual gathering, where executives from Walmart (WMT.O), Shake Shack (SHAK.N), and Jersey Mike’s were among presenters while bankers, lawyers and private equity investors spent much of their time brokering deals and landing clients behind the scenes. The upbeat mood was a marked shift from last spring after U.S. President Donald Trump's "Liberation Day" tariff announcements sent markets skidding and killed or stalled several consumer and retail deals. The second half of the year saw a resurgence in activity that brought with it several mega deals, including Kimberly-Clark’s (KMB.O) nearly $50 billion deal to buy Kenvue (KVUE.N), announced in November. "(Companies) are still really focused on growth and synergies. They’re looking at bigger deals than they’ve been willing to do for the last number of years. The back half of last year was the start of that,” Frost said. Kraft Heinz (KHC.O) announced in September it would split into two companies to unwind its 2015 merger, shortly after Keurig Dr Pepper (KDP.O) had agreed to buy JDE Peet’s for $18 billion with plans to split the coffee and non-coffee beverages into separate companies. In apparel, Gildan Activewear (GIL) bought Hanesbrands for $2.2 billion. Investors could also spur more deals and corporate breakups in the sectors, Audra Cohen, co-head of the consumer and retail group at law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, said in an interview at the conference. Corporate agitators have taken recent stakes in Lululemon Athletica (LULU.O) and Target (TGT.N), but aren't yet pushing for M&A. Lululemon hosted a morning yoga class and its management team met with analysts and investors at the conference. Meanwhile, private equity buyers are beating out companies for some deals, Manna Tree Partners co-founder Ellie Rubenstein told Reuters. Her firm sold its cottage cheese brand Good Culture to a larger consumer-focused firm L Catterton just last week. “A lot of these brands have gotten lost (inside big corporations) and the consumers don’t like it. You may see a lot of corporate carveouts this year,” Rubenstein told Reuters in an interview after her keynote address. She interviewed her billionaire father and Carlyle co-founder David Rubenstein, 76, on stage at the conference. The father-daughter pair contrasted their portfolios, pointing to Carlyle’s history of investing in fast food chains like McDonald's (MCD.N) and KFC Korea while Manna Tree saw big returns from investments in healthier food brands like pasture-raised egg producer Vital Farms (VITL.O) and Good Culture.

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2/12/2026

Ancora Could See Multiple Ways to Win in Warner Bros. Fight

Bloomberg (02/12/26) Monks, Matthew

Ancora Holdings Group — the investor that jumped into the takeover fight for Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. (NASDAQ: WBD) Wednesday — has made a splash by showing up in high-profile M&A situations. The firm, whose activism arm is led by James Chadwick, played key roles in the mergers of United States Steel Corp. and Norfolk Southern Corp. (NYSE: NSC), among others. Ancora unsuccessfully tried to scuttle US Steel's sale to Nippon Steel Corp. (OTCMKTS: NPSCY), while its winning push for management changes at Norfolk helped pave the way for the rail operator's mega-merger with Union Pacific Corp. (NYSE: UNP). Ancora, based in Cleveland, is urging Warner Bros. to reject Netflix Inc.'s (NASDAQ: NFLX) offer and reconsider a bid by Paramount Skydance Corp. (NASDAQ: PSKY), describing the Netflix offer as “inferior” while questioning the streaming giant's political pull. Regardless of whether Ancora succeeds, its Warner Bros. push shores up its reputation for making noise around some of the biggest names in corporate America make strategic moves. “In all of these situations we're looking for multiple ways to win,” Chadwick, president of Ancora's alternatives subsidiary, said at Bloomberg's activism conference last year. “We don't want to have one pathway to an exit or successful outcome. We're looking to design these in a way that there's multiple ways that this gets to a good outcome in the end.” The firm’s activist fund, Bellator, gained more than 17% in 2025, according to a person familiar with the matter who declined to be identified because the details aren’t public. A representative for Ancora wasn’t immediately available for comment. “Ancora has ascended to the top tier of activists over the past five years,” Lawrence Elbaum, M&A partner at Sullivan & Cromwell and co-head of the firm’s shareholder activism defense practice, said in a statement. “While one may think that’s because of its hard-fighting ways, a lot of the success has been driven by working with CEOs and directors behind the scenes. The firm has a lot of tools in its toolbox.” With about $11 billion in assets under management, Ancora started in 2003 as a registered investment adviser, or wealth advisory firm. Ancora Chief Executive Officer Fred DiSanto, looking to differentiate the firm by offering clients access to shareholder activism, recruited former Relational Investors executive Chadwick in 2014 lead the effort. It first started by targeting small companies such as Riverview Bancorp Inc. (NASDAQ: RVSB) and DHI Group Inc. (NYSE: DHX). By 2022, Ancora had grown the hedge fund division, which houses its activist strategy, to about $1.2 billion. Having committed capital in hedge funds and the ability to raise special-purpose vehicles from its wealth-management base helped Ancora up its ambitions. In the early 2020s, the firm began targeting ever-bigger targets such as retailer Kohl’s Corp. (NYSE: KSS), packaging firm Berry Global and toy company Hasbro Inc. (NASDAQ: HAS). The firm’s breakout moment as a top-tier activist may have been its acrimonious campaign against Norfolk Southern, which ended in a partial victory as it placed three of its nominees on the board. Ancora had sought to win control of the board to force out Alan Shaw as chief executive officer. Chadwick burnished his reputation as an outspoken agitator at Norfolk Southern's 2024 annual meeting, when he called out passive institutional investors for their lack of support and said they would be culpable should the company have another deadly accident after the disastrous 2023 derailment in Ohio. Norfolk Southern fired Shaw in 2024 for a relationship with a colleague. With its Midwestern roots and ties to unions, Ancora initially tended to target old-line industries such as rail, industrials, manufacturing and packaging, though it has become more sector agnostic in recent years. It also has a particular interest on situations that touch its home market. “For us there’s somewhat connectivity to our own backyard where we live and where we work,” Chadwick said in an interview last year with CNBC. “Some of these stories we’re involved with when you talk about US Steel, obviously Cleveland has a long history in the steel industry, we have a lot of relationships in steel as well. So these things really hit home for us.”

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2/12/2026

Commentary: Toyota Gets a Stinging Buyout Bloody Nose

Reuters (02/12/26) Lockett, Hudson

Hudson Lockett, Asia Columnist for Reuters Breakingviews in Hong Kong, says, "Toyota has two options: take it on the chin now or risk a haymaker later. Insiders at the powerful industrial group have just received a stinging bloody nose in their battle to take Toyota Industries (6201.T) private for a lowball 5.65 trillion yen ($37 billion). The consortium that includes Toyota Motor (7203.T), its chair Akio Toyoda, and the family's unlisted Toyota Fudosan had to admit on Thursday that they had failed to convince independent shareholders in the forklift and car-parts maker to accept their woefully inadequate bid. So they're extending their tender offer a couple more weeks. That's unlikely to win over the many holdouts, leaving the consortium with the unpalatable choice of either raising the price substantially or dropping the deal and having Elliott Investment Management in their face for the foreseeable future. The wannabe buyers' announcement gives them time to raise the offer from its current 18,800 yen per share, despite asserting last month that they had “no intention” of doing so. But they also acknowledge that only 33% of outstanding shares have been tendered. Paul Singer’s Elliott, which owns a 7.1% stake in the target, says this equates to fewer than one in five independent shareholders tendering. That's a blow to the consortium’s assertion that the offer price “reflects the intrinsic value” of Industries. The activist on Friday repeated its call for investors not to tender shares and recommended that those few who already have to withdraw. With Industries shares jumping another 2% on Friday morning to their highest level since the deal’s announcement, the odds of Toyota convincing the other four-fifths to accept the current offer price look slim. The simplest path forward would be to raise their bid to meet Elliott’s stated valuation of 26,134 yen per share for the target. That would offer decent returns to motivate outside shareholders and provide some proof, should the activist press for more in court, that buyers ultimately engaged in good faith negotiation on the target’s valuation, albeit belatedly. This outcome is hardly ideal for Toyoda’s consortium, but the other option looks positively grueling: walk away from the deal and continue to grapple with the constant hassle of Elliott as Industries’ biggest external shareholder. In this scenario, the combative activist would probably press Industries to sell its cross-shareholdings with the rest of Toyota group and return the capital to all investors, rather than mostly to the insiders' consortium as envisaged in the buyout offer. That won't sit well with Toyota. However, the prospect of Elliott continually jabbing at Industries could yet provide impetus for an equitable deal before the new deadline."

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2/11/2026

Teradata Agrees to Board Changes With Lynrock Lake. The Stock Soars 22%.

Barron's (02/11/26) Wolf, Nate

Teradata (NYSE: TDC) is shaking up its board of directors as part of an agreement with investor Lynrock Lake. Wall Street seems to like the move. The board will appoint Melissa Fisher, previously the chief financial officer of Outreach.io, as a director by March 1, and will work with Lynrock Lake to identify another independent director to join the board later this year. Two current directors will retire over the next two years as part of the plan. Shares of Teradata, which makes a cloud database and data analytics platform, jumped 22% to $35.54 on Wednesday. Lynrock Lake filed a securities disclosure last March changing to the stance of an investor and announcing that it had amassed 9.4 million shares in Teradata—about 10% of the company. The investment firm viewed Teradata stock as undervalued and pushed for the hiring of a permanent chief financial officer. Teradata appointed John Ederer to that role two months later. Teradata shares have risen more than 45% over the last 12 months but remain well off their all-time closing high of $80.62 in September 2012. “We firmly believe in the long-term value potential of Teradata and look forward to Melissa’s contributions and further Board refreshment to advance the Company’s strategic initiatives and enhance value for all shareholders,” said Lynrock Lake CEO Cynthia Paul. As part of the agreement, Lynrock Lake will support the board’s full slate of directors at the company’s 2026 annual meeting, and also agreed to certain customary standstill provisions limiting further activist activity. The board shakeup came the same day Teradata breezed past earnings Wall Street’s expectations for the fourth quarter. The company posted adjusted earnings of 74 cents a share for the quarter, surpassing analysts’ estimates of 56 cents. Revenue was $421 million, up 3% from last year and above Wall Street’s call for $400.5 million. Teradata expects annual recurring revenue, or ARR, growth of 2% to 4% in 2026 and adjusted earnings of $2.60 a share at the midpoint. Analysts were looking for ARR growth of around 1% and adjusted earnings of $2.54 a share. The ARR forecast was the “biggest positive” of the earnings report, said UBS analyst Radi Sultan, who argued the company could exceed that 2% to 4% range. UBS reiterated a Neutral rating on the stock but bumped its price target to $36 from $23. Competition from more modern data vendors, such as Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW), Databricks, and Palantir Technologies (NASDAQ: PLTR), is keeping UBS (NYSE: UBS) on the sidelines. “While these results are encouraging we have yet to pickup any major changes in the competitive outlook,” wrote Sultan.

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2/11/2026

Podcast: A Hedge Funds's $8 Billion Bet on Venezuela's Citgo

Financial Times (02/11/26) Tindera, Michela; Pollard, Amelia; Mourselas, Costas

When the hedge fund Elliott Management pursued the acquisition of the oil refinery business Citgo a few years ago, the deal was already a complicated one. A U.S. court had ordered its current owner, Venezuela, to sell the business, and the country was not happy about it. But, things only got thornier after the U.S. President Donald Trump removed the Caribbean nation’s leader Nicolás Maduro. The Financial Time’s U.S. investment correspondent Amelia Pollard and hedge fund correspondent Costas Mourselas explain how Elliott often thrives pursuing complex deals, and how they might navigate closing this one.

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2/11/2026

Toyota, Elliott Clash Over $35 Billion Buyout Bid: 5 Things to Know

Nikkei Asia (02/11/26) Shiga, Yuichi

A proxy war is intensifying between Toyota Group (NYSE: TM) and Elliott Investment Management over the automaking group's 5.4-trillion-yen ($35 billion) plan to take its founding firm -- Toyota Industries (OTCMKTS: TYIDY)-- private. The New York hedge fund is urging shareholders not to accept the offer, saying the price is too low. Toyota Group counters that it is fair. Toyota Group aims to raise its combined ownership in Toyota Industries to 66.7% from 42%, as part of a plan to take the company private. Toyota Motor Chairman Akio Toyoda says that the founding firm must play a central role in the group's technological transformation, and that it should be freed from short-term shareholder pressures to try bold ideas. The transaction is also part of Toyota Group's broader effort to unwind cross-shareholdings. Under the strategy, for example, a portion of the buyout cost will be offset by Toyota Motor repurchasing shares held by Toyota Industries. The 29-day offer period is due to lapse on Thursday. How the proxy fight will play out is being closely watched by investors for clues to the fate of not only Toyota Group but also of corporate governance reforms in Japan, which have been a key factor driving the Japanese stock market that has doubled in value in the last three years. Here are five things to know: Founded a century ago by Sakichi Toyoda, a great grandfather of Akio Toyoda, Toyota Industries is today the world's top forklift manufacturer. Based in Kariya, central Japan, the company evolved from its origins as a small maker of textile looms to later produce cars and then forklifts -- a transformation Akio Toyoda calls an embodiment of the flexibility and innovativeness of the nation's largest manufacturing group. In 1949, the company went public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Toyota Industries remains the mothership of Toyota Group, owning 9% of Toyota Motor, 11% of trading house Toyota Tsusho, nearly 6% of parts maker Denso and significant stakes in many other Toyota Group companies. More recently, however, Toyota Industries has faced intense investor pressure to improve asset efficiency and boost returns to shareholders: The value of its holdings of Toyota Group shares has grown almost equal to its own market capitalization. Analysts view the amount as too large to be disposed of in the open market or to be spent for capital investment or share buybacks. For Toyota Group, undoing the cross-shareholdings also carries the risk of making companies such as Toyota Industries more vulnerable to hostile takeover bids. Elliott says Toyota Industries, the world's largest forklift maker, can be made more profitable by improving its global operations and shifting its focus from the auto industry to logistics; Toyota Group decided that privatization was the best solution, but achieving that requires controlling more shares. On April 26, 2025, Nikkei reported the existence of such a plan for Toyota Industries. On June 3, Toyota Group formally announced a plan to launch a tender offer for Toyota Industries for 16,300 yen ($105) a share. Its goal is to fully acquire the company via a so-called squeeze-out, or the compulsory purchase of minority shareholders' stakes in a company. To achieve that, Toyota Group needs two-thirds, or 66.7%, support from shareholders. With Toyota Motor already owning 24.66%, the Group needs another 42%. A 29-day tender offer was launched on Jan. 15 for the takeover bid, or TOB. Toyota Group companies, including Denso, Toyota Tsusho, asset management arm Toyota Fudosan and parts maker Aisin, together own 18% of shares in Toyota Industries. The buyout is being led by Toyota Fudosan. The company and Akio Toyoda have set up a special purpose company and launched a 4.7-trillion-yen ($30.4 billion) tender offer, backed by Toyota Motor, which has supplied 0.7 trillion yen in preferred shares, and banks, which offered 2.8 trillion yen in loans. If the bid succeeds, an extraordinary shareholders meeting will be held to secure approval for the squeeze-out. If that succeeds, Toyota Industries is expected to go private as early as late-April. Koichi Ito, president of Toyota Industries, said during an online press conference in June last year that the company will "leverage the advantages of management freedom to maintain and strengthen sales" by delisting; The most controversial part of the TOB, is the offer price. When Toyota Group announced its offer of 16,300 yen a share for Toyota Industries on June 3, that marked an 11% discount from the day's closing price of 18,400 yen. Toyota justified the offer price, saying that the shares had already surged following the Nikkei report on April 26 and that the offer price represented a 23% premium on the closing price of 13,225 yen on April 25. Before then, Toyota Industries' shares hovered around 13,000 yen. Toyota Group also said that it had obtained opinions from three financial institutions calling the offer fair. "The takeover bid price is the best one which reflects the target company's essential value and we have no intention to change the takeover bid price," Toyota Asset Junbi, the acquiring company established by the Toyota group solely for the purpose of carrying out the bid, said in a statement early this month; On Nov. 11, Elliott disclosed its ownership of 3.26% of Toyota Industries shares. It says the TOB significantly undervalues Toyota Industries. It also says the process lacks transparency and falls short of proper governance practices. Toyota Group raised the bid price by 15% to 18,800 yen on Jan. 14, the day before it launched the 29-day tender offer, which rose to 5.4 trillion yen from the initial 4.7 trillion yen. But the U.S. investor dismissed the higher amount, arguing that the upward revision incorporates only a fraction of the increase in the value of Toyota Industries' publicly traded equity holdings. "The credibility of the Toyota Group and Japan's capital markets are at stake," the hedge fund warned. Corporate governance reform measures introduced in Japan since 2013 are precisely meant to protect shareholder interests in such situations, it argued. "If the Revised TOB is allowed to succeed, it will result in a substantial and potentially irreversible setback for Japan's corporate governance reforms and dampen investor interest in the Japanese market." On Feb. 5, Elliott raised its stake to 7.14%. Elliott maintains that Toyota Industries has an intrinsic net asset value of 26,134 yen per share, adding that the stock price could exceed 40,000 yen by March 2028 if the company improves its global operations, strengthens its product lineup for emerging markets and shifts its focus from the automotive business to logistics. While Toyota Industries has many attractive assets and businesses such as its mainstay forklift manufacturing, Elliott argues that the Japanese company faces governance issues. Toyota Industries says it understands many of the concerns voiced by Elliott, but is not persuaded by its argument that profitability can be improved as quickly as the hedge fund suggests; Toyota Group says in its TOB proposal that it will safeguard the interests of minority shareholders by securing support from a majority of them. But some investors question whether the "majority-of-minority" principle is being strictly upheld in the TOB process. Counting Denso, Aisin and Toyota Tsusho as minority shareholders is not fair, argues Kazunari Sakai, head of Japan research at London-based Asset Value Investors. "While Asset Value Investors continues to hold shares of Toyota Industries, we believe this tender offer price falls below the intrinsic value of the shares." He believes a minimum fair valuation is at least 25,000 yen per share.

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2/11/2026

Why Elliott Bet That LSEG Could Weather AI Storm

Financial Times (02/11/26) Asgari, Nikou; Barnes, Oliver; Armstrong, Ashley; et al.

With a 300-year history dating back to Jonathan’s Coffee House in the Square Mile, the London Stock Exchange Group (LON: LSEG) has survived technological upheaval before. Elliott is betting that the data and stock exchange group can weather the threat from AI, which has sent its shares tumbling. While best known for running the London Stock Exchange, LSEG makes most of its money by selling data on stocks, bonds, commodities and other assets to banks, brokers and investors. For months, investors have worried that the company’s business is at risk from powerful AI models capable of rapidly digesting and analyzing data. Doubts over the value of its analytics business, as AI tools become more powerful and pervasive, have wiped more than a third off the company’s value over the past year. Even as the threat of AI prompted sell-offs in wealth managers, insurance brokers and other legacy financial groups potentially exposed to the technology’s advance this month, the investor is reportedly unfazed. Elliott has been talking to LSEG’s leadership, according to people familiar with the matter, encouraging the group to boost its share buybacks and close the gap on profitability with its peers such as MSCI (NYSE: MSCI) and CME Group (NASDAQ: CME). Still, despite jumping on news of the investor’s stake on Wednesday, LSEG shares closed slightly down. The group said in a statement that it “maintains an active and open dialogue with our investors, while remaining focused on executing our strategy." LSEG has had to transform before. Under chief executive David Schwimmer it has become a financial data giant through the 2019 $27 billion acquisition of Refinitiv. The LSE itself now makes up just 4% of group revenues. Schwimmer has been resolute in his response to concerns over AI, telling investors in October that “AI cannot replicate or replace our real-time data.” LSEG’s data and analytics division accounted for nearly half of its profits in the third quarter. The chief executive is also expected to defend the group’s complicated, diverse structure as a strength at LSEG’s annual results at the end of the month. LSEG has argued that its collection of businesses — from its LCH clearing house to compliance unit Risk Intelligence and IFR financial journalism magazine — is an “all weather” strategy, according to one person close to the company. “The share price has been under pressure. Elliott’s appearance might help them to articulate the strategy and show how they will unlock value — particularly by applying AI and technology across its diverse business,” another person familiar with the company’s thinking said. Investor fears around AI were crystallized in July 2025, when San Francisco-based start up Anthropic launched its Claude for Financial Services tool, with sophisticated financial modeling capabilities. “Ever since Claude for Financial Services launched last summer, LSEG shares have been a lightning rod for market fears about AI disruption risk,” said Tom Mills, analyst at RBC Capital Markets. LSEG is also using AI. With Microsoft, which took a 4% stake in the group in 2022, LSEG has promoted itself as offering data and AI tools to carry out financial modeling, benchmarking and other services. But the impact has been muted. Ian White, senior analyst at Autonomous Research, said the appeal of using LSEG for customer-facing AI is being questioned: The UK company is now “not as broad in terms of relevance and applicability as [it] thought [it was] going to be." White added that the AI threat is more pronounced for LSEG than other exchange groups such as Euronext (OTCMKTS: ERNXY) and Deutsche Boerse (OTCMKTS: DBOEY), which make more of their money from traditional exchange businesses, rather than data and analytics. Many analysts argue that the group will be protected from AI’s advance by its unique, proprietary data. That can be plugged into others’ models through partnerships with OpenAI, Anthropic and software group Databricks, among others. The company’s data “is key to these models being successful,” said one person close to LSEG. Ben Needham, UK quality portfolio manager at Ninety One, a top 20 LSEG shareholder, said the company “is now quality at a very good price and we’ve been leaning in heavily [buying] in the last few weeks." He added that data and software companies “have been sold off indiscriminately” in the face of AI fears. Elliott’s position in LSEG points to its belief that the company should profit from the expected AI transformation in financial services, not falter. Its call for more buybacks could meet some resistance from a group that completed a £1 billion share buyback program last year and finished a further £1 billion in repurchases on Wednesday. “The market is addicted to the methadone of capital returns at the moment rather than the opportunity for long-term growth,” said one person familiar with the group’s business model. White of Autonomous said the company has the balance sheet space to consider buying back £3.5 billion more in shares, which could help appease Elliott. Cuts in areas such as “third party costs, IT expenses, consultant support” could improve profitability, he added. Another option to mollify the investor could be for LSEG to sell its roughly £10 billion stake in Tradeweb (NASDAQ: TW), an electronic debt trading platform that has grown rapidly in recent years. While other constituent parts of the group could be sold off, selling the LSE itself is not an option that Elliott has pushed for, according to people familiar with the situation. City advisers suggested that the business could still be unpicked with Elliott’s intervention, urging a more focused approach. For now, discussions have been friendly. But one adviser cautioned: “They kick people hard.”

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2/10/2026

Proxy Voting: Asset Managers Increased Their Support for Management in 2025

Morningstar (02/10/26) Stewart, Lindsey

Regulatory scrutiny of proxy voting intensified in 2025 amid political concerns that proxy advisers and large index managers were pushing coordinated, ESG-driven agendas against corporate management. However, Morningstar’s latest research suggests the opposite trend: the largest U.S. asset managers are increasingly voting in favor of company management rather than against it. Analyzing proxy votes from 50 major U.S. equity and allocation fund managers over the past three years, the study found average support for management proposals rose to just over 96% in the 2025 proxy year, up from about 95% previously. This increase was driven largely by stronger backing for director elections, which dominate management resolutions, as well as modestly higher support for executive pay proposals, despite those remaining the most contested. At the same time, support for shareholder proposals declined, particularly on environmental and social issues, which were most affected by the SEC’s tightening of permissible proposals. When broken down by size, voting patterns diverged sharply. The largest 10 managers—including BlackRock (BLK), Vanguard, and State Street—showed the strongest rise in management support, reaching nearly 98% on average, while their backing of shareholder proposals fell into single digits. Smaller managers were consistently more supportive of shareholder resolutions, though their support also declined year over year.The findings und erscore that proxy voting behavior varies widely by manager size. For investors focused on governance or sustainability outcomes, understanding how a fund manager votes—not just what it holds—is critical to aligning investments with personal priorities.

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