The battle for Target‘s board of directors continues to build in advance of the company’s May 28 shareholders meeting, where investors will elect the board.
Activist investor William Ackman, whose hedge-fund controls about an 8 percent stake in Target, took to the airwaves Wednesday with an interview on Bloomberg.
Ackman is seeking to elect himself, along with a grocery executive, a credit-card executive, a real-estate investor and a corporate governance expert, all of whom are expected to be sympathetic to Ackman’s campaign for Target to spin-off its real-estate holdings into a separate company, which would lease it back to the stores.
“I think it’s major change for the company. Those disciplines are not represented on the current board,” Ackman told Bloomberg. (See interview above.)
Meanwhile, Target has issued another letter to shareholders advocating for its board nominees and attempting to undercut Ackman. The letter boldly quotes Ackman (possibly out of context?) saying he doesn’t know what’s the right thing to do with Target’s credit card division, and that he’s had a constructive working relationship with the company. To be continued…
Though I am not a fan of Hedge Funds or corporate “raiders”, as a consumer, I have noticed a decline in Target’s operations. Short inventories, bare shelves, less choices, non-competitive pricing in some areas, and other deficiencies have appeared in recent years. Their new credit card operations are really terrible — we are cancelling ours. Maybe a “wake-up” call will be good for the company, and ultimately Minnesota with a stronger local corporation.