Every annual meeting I’ve seen recently has been a virtual meeting.
Are they more effective/less effective than an in-person meeting?
What I’ve noticed (for past decade)....these stockholder meetings have gone in wild directions, and occasionally....some group has gotten measures up for a vote, which the board/CEO folks weren’t expecting. Some of these were destructive to the company service/brand....some were correcting bad decisions by the board/CEO.
Covid opened up the door for more virtual company meetings, and avoiding the confrontational situation. But you still have the threat that someone will get shares/votes, and create a problem in the path of a company.
I will say this...when you have a investment-fund company that owns 5-percent of a companies shares...they can find the votes to manipulate who gets on the board (Fox might be an example of that). That one person can infect things like lawyers hired for HR or finance, and create a path where a commercial company is no longer independent, but part of the investment company mentality.
If you had some vast decision made to trend up a certain style of clothing (say ‘pride’), and force twenty fashion stores to order the product, I might get a national trend going.
At the same time, if you had a pallet arrive at a store in some southern town, with 300 ‘pride’ t-shirts, and fewer than 20 sell the first week of June, and on 1 July...I still have 200 t-shirts unsold....what do you think happens to the 200? Discount by 50-percent, and a week later....piled into a box sent to a freighter, and shipped to Africa to be sold for 10-cents a shirt?