Baran: Cooperative activism beats hostile campaigns in Japan over long time horizons
David Baran · David Baran and Kazuhiko Shibata – Friendly Activism in Japan at Symphony (Capital Allocators, EP.176) · Feb 8, 2021 · at 31:31
David Baran, co-founder of Symphony Financial Partners, explains why Symphony chose friendly shareholder engagement over hostile activism in Japan.
0:00 / 0:23exact quote · 23.7s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“This is going to take a long, long time before you get a real market for corporate control, and it's going to take a long time to digest all the companies that could be digested even after that's understood. So let's not play the hostile game and have people against us. Let's play the cooperative game and have people working with us.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from David Baran
Baran: Japan's governance reform is driven by domestic pensions, not foreign activists
“This is not a CalPERS, CalSTRS, Hermes problem. This is a Japanese pension fund problem that the Japanese have to decide for themselves To start paying their beneficiaries properly.”
Baran: Believing liquid stocks trading $10M daily are mispriced is arrogant
“If you think something that trades ten million dollars a day is going to be mispriced, your own arrogance is just too big.”
Baran: Japan's pension reforms forced price-insensitive liquidation of equity portfolios
“Because for some god unknown reason, the government said, we don't want to take your assets, we'll take your cash. So everything was converted into cash, and there was no price sensitivity at all.”
Baran: Early hostile activists failed in Japan because society resisted their methods
“The business culture and, you know, society was not ready for the kind of hostility and just pure greed that it looked like in these transactions.”