In light of the Financial Supervisory Commission’s objective to push for digitalization of shareholder meetings and as part of the government’s Covid prevention policy, TDCC established a live streaming shareholder meeting platform, which was officially launched on April 1, 2022. The platform is open to all publicly listed companies and it marks a new era of online shareholder meeting in Taiwan.

Following the successful conclusion of PSMC’s online shareholder meeting, King’s Town Bank (2809 TT), which is headquartered in Tainan, will also hold a video-aided shareholder meeting on May 9. The bank will be the first financial company in Taiwan to hold an online shareholder meeting this year. As the Covid pandemic made a comeback in Taiwan, King’s Town Bank wants to provide real-time, online access to its shareholder meeting so that shareholders won’t need to travel afar and expose themselves to potential cluster infection. This will be a significant step forward in financial corporate governance in Taiwan.

In the past, shareholders had to travel long distance to physically attend a shareholder meeting held in central or southern Taiwan. Starting this year, King’s Town Bank will still hold a shareholder meeting in Tainan, but video-assisted online access will also be provided to allow participation by other shareholders from anywhere in the world. Space constraint is no longer an issue, and this is in line with shareholder activism. King’s Town Bank has highly valued corporate governance, and allowing online participation is not only a good way to maintain good connections with shareholders, but also an extra plus for its corporate governance.

Since late April this year, the number of new Covid infections has increased exponentially in Taiwan. A physical shareholder meeting requires the attendance of company management, meeting staff and a large number of shareholders, and the risk of cluster infection is high in an event like this. Against this backdrop, online shareholder meeting is indeed a better and safer alternative for the majority of shareholders. King’s Town Bank will provide live streaming of its shareholder meeting in full, so shareholders can listen to the management’s report on future operations and send text messages to interact with the management before voting on proposals.

TDCC President Han-Chiang Chu said TDCC’s e-Stockvote allows shareholders to vote electronically and attend shareholder meetings online. E-voting will take place before the meeting is convened physically, while the live streaming of meeting enables real-time participation, which is quite convenient for both shareholders and companies. The e-voting service was launched in 2009, and adopted by 62.7% of shareholders of publicly-listed companies in 2021, which was a remarkable achievement. The newly launched live streaming service in 2022 provides shareholders with a new option of attending shareholder meetings, and it may come in handy in the time of a severe pandemic.

With the peak season for shareholder meetings approaching in May and June, about 70 companies other than PSMC and King’s Town Bank will also provide visual-assisted shareholder meetings. Many among them are financial companies. Shareholders of these companies may visit the platform website at https://www.stockvote.com.tw/evote/index.html to make registrations beforehand. Operational instructions and details are available at the Video Shareholder Meeting section of TDCC’s official webpage.