Monday, November 28, 2011

State asset sales - why it could be good

With the emphasis on "could".  An endemic major problem in big corporates in both state and private sectors in this country is bad management, and the bigger they are, the worse they usually are.  We see this in the case of NZ Post, and its pre-1987 split division of  Telecom - what possessed that board to appoint Theresa "Train Wreck" Gattung as boss for 7 years? 

This problem in turn is a result of shareholders not taking an active enough interest in their investments, and often they make no comments or scrutiny at all.  Usually institutional investors like pension funds and insurance companies will give all their proxy votes at General Meetings to the board Chairman.   One good thing that corporate raider Ron Brierley did in the 1960s-1980s was to light fires under lazy managements and get their act into gear, but he's not around now.

With state owned enterprises, the control with most of them rests with the Minister of State Owned Enterprises, and for the most part he does nothing.  Having some active as opposed to passive investors involved to shake up the bad management of these organisations could mean they are more efficiently run.

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