SEOUL (APP/AFP) – Samsung Electronics
responded warily Thursday to a plan submitted by the US activist hedge fund Elliott Management for splitting the South Korean electronics giant into a separate holding and operating company.
“We will carefully review the shareholders’ proposals,” the
technology conglomerate said in a terse one-line statement, with its spokesmen declining any further comment.
Entities controlled by Elliott, the hedge fund run by billionaire
Paul Singer, own about 0.62 percent of Samsung.
In a detailed proposal unveiled on Wednesday, Elliott laid out a
strategy for streamlining Samsung, splitting the company in two, dual-listing the resulting operating company on a US exchange and paying shareholders a special dividend of 30 trillion won ($27 billion).
Elliott argued that Samsung, currently a maze of listed and unlisted
companies with a notoriously opaque ownership and management structure, had
suffered from a long-term undervaluation in the equity market.
Samsung shares surged as much as 5.0 percent in morning trade on the
South Korean stock exchange.
Elliott’s proposal comes at a sensitive time for Samsung, which is in
the middle of a leadership succession and struggling with an unprecedented global recall of some 2.5 million Galaxy Note 7s after the smartphones were found to have faulty batteries.
International News
Samsung to ‘review’ US hedge fund plan to split firm
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