Comment on circular + vote, vote, voteThis is becoming a new company in a very tangible way. (Yes, I know we've heard it before but this time I'd say it's for real.)
Gillberry and Skippen are leaving the board. My view is that they're very smart people but smart people can still make misjudgments or even be prone to certain types of misjudgments. Though I haven't asked either of them, my guess is that they'd be willing, privately, to concede that they've made key misjudgments WRT Quarterhill. Probably for the best that they leave the board as they pledged to do a year ago.
I'd call it encouraging to see Rusty Lewis taking the role of lead director. If nothing else, it suggests that he sincerely believes in the story.
Bit of a disappointment, but not a big surprise, that Kim Stevenson is NOT running for re-election. Her joining Quarterhill in 2022 was always a bit of a mystery to me. Her qualifications in tech are so huge that you have to wonder why she isn't on the board of, say, Microsoft or Amazon. Regardless, not a surprise that she might have had her sights on bigger fish than Quarterhill. Note that in the past year she joined the board of Verisk Analytics--which has a market cap of around $30 billion.
Also, Stevenson has a history of NOT sticking around long with boards of directors. She used to be on the board of Skyworks Solutions (much bigger than Quarterhill) and then left. Same with Boston Private Financial Holdings, Cloudera, and Riverbed Technology.
I see they've retained Kingsdale (again) to get the vote out. I've argued to management on and off that it shouldn't be necessary but I can respect their conclusion that it is. It certainly would be bad if they were not to reach quorum for the AGM. I'm glad to see the cost is only a little over $30,000. My guess would have been $60,000.
I'd encourage people to vote their shares right away--long before any phone call from Kingsdale.
Of course people can (and should) vote their shares however they want. I would suggest, though, that there's no sense in casting a protest negative vote just because the share price recently fell. If you're really inclined to vote against then it would make more sense to sell the stock and move on to things that you can believe in.