주주행동주의에 대한 대응 방안

In recent decades, we could have noticed several phenomena in the US capital market such as very rapid changes in shareholders, shortening the period of stock retention, and institutional investors becoming the main players in the stock markets. Individual investors, who are true shareholders, have become bystanders and are not participating in decision-making of company. In particular, recent performance of the shareholder-activism funds was notable. Shareholder activists are known to be investors with little interest in the long-term development of a company. Firms dominated by shareholder activists tend to blur the notion of corporate prosperity and co-growth between company and employee, and companies ignore wage increases of employee even when a company has achieved the ever highest performance and profit. They seek only additional profit by increasing layoffs or accelerating wage cuts through concentrating on off-shoring. This phenomenon is gradually progressing not only in the United States but also in the present Korea. In addition, tendency of belonging of a corporation to any country and to any region is weakening. Boldly give up the benefit of belonging to the state for the purpose of pursuit of profits or saving by taking advantage of regulatory differences between countries or regions. The CEOs, who are promised enormous compensation, are bent on meeting institutional investors’ hopes for short-term share price rallies while ignoring the interests of other stake-holders in the company. The typical characteristic feature of modern capital markets can be referred to as separion of ownership from individual investors, who are true stockholders, to institutional investors, who are mere agents of true stockholders. Another feature may be the separation between professional managers, who are agents of shareholders, and institutional investors, who are agents of investors. This feature can also be referred as to the conflict between two powers of ‘corporate-manager agents’ and ‘money- manager agents’. In the paper, the writer has shed light on the positive and negative roles of shareholder activists under the revision of the Korea Capital Market Act and examined ways to protect domestic companies from the negative aspects of the shareholder activists.