Vote Against LVT Annual General Meeting Resolutions 1, 2, 7, 9 & 10

I will start this post with the declaration that my main objective is the removal of Karl Redenbach and Peter Nguyen-Brown as directors of LVT.
To my knowledge there are two main mechanisms to achieve this (please correct me if I’ve got anything wrong here or additional information would be useful).
The first is a substantial shareholder (over 5.0%) can call an Extraordinary General Meeting and put forward a motion for the removal of directors to be voted on by shareholders. I’ve seen this done before with shareholders below 5.0% effectively acting as a block and combining shareholdings to reach the 5.0% threshold. This is something that could be done in future but would require a reasonable amount of prior organisation. If any major shareholders are reading this, please give due consideration to pursuing this.
The second is achieving a strike (a vote of 25% of shareholders) against the Adoption of the Remuneration Report (resolution 1 at the AGM) at two consecutive AGMs. If this occurs then the board can be voted out of office (google “second strike remuneration report” for further information). It is important to note that the votes against the remuneration report at the 2019 AGM were 24.70% and at the 2020 AGM were 24.98% (that’s if you believe the validity of those vote numbers anyway??) so with only a handful of extra shareholder votes against the remuneration reports at those two AGMs Karl and Peter could potentially be out the door already. That is why it’s so important that everyone exercises their rights to vote as a retail shareholder (or institutional for that matter if any of them are reading this) and vote against the remuneration report this year.
I could easily write an essay of several thousand words on why removing these two hopeless arseclowns from being LVT directors is the appropriate course of action, but is the interest of brevity I’ll try to be more succinct. I should also add that my main objection is against Karl, but nevertheless Peter is Karl’s pathetic corporate patsy and partner-in-crime and needs to be removed as well.
The main reason that Karl is so ineffectual and so dangerous is that he is horrendously bad with the company’s capital. LVT experienced massive cash burn from 2017-2020 at a time when the company was supposed to be undergoing “hyper growth” in ARR which never eventuated. From memory he has cut costs (ie sacked people) three times, only to change his mind one or two quarters later and ramp up the spending again. Each time this has resulted in large redundancy costs, and I refuse to believe that the new employees were noticeably better than the old ones. Each time he obviously thinks he’s fooling the market into believing that he’s being fiscally responsible only to return to his old ways, leaving nothing changed and just incurring unnecessary redundancy costs. It’s so stupid and so transparent. Also, it’s difficult to analyse the performance of the acquired companies, but based on the ongoing lack of ARR growth, none of them seem to have been outstanding successes (Wizdom in particular seems questionable) and all have resulted in large shareholder dilution.
The second reason that Karl is such a poor director is that he clearly does not have shareholders best interests at heart. He has demonstrated this in so many different ways that I have lost count. He and Peter are paid way too much for a company the size of LVT and one with such a terrible share price performance, rather than taking moderate salaries and getting most of their rewards from growing the share price (the way successful management teams tend to do). He is the greatest example of “overpromise and underdeliver” that I have ever seen: from the delayed and eventually cancelled deadline by which they would get to $100m in ARR (and still nowhere near it), to previous incessant references to “hyper growth”, to the continual reliance on referencing being the AFR’s fastest growing tech stock, to the promise to get to cashflow breakeven by the end of December 2020 which wasn’t achieved and then forgotten about, to wanting to have 50% of the world’s top 300 companies as customers. One telling event that goes right to Karl’s character was when at the depths of the Covid pandemic in 2020 he changed the definition of ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) for LVT to include services income in a desperate (and again, completely transparent) attempt to make the figures look better. Anyone who knows anything about ARR knows that it should really only include ongoing software subscription fees, and certainly does not include services revenues. Hence, in this instance Karl was effectively lying to shareholders and investors at large in a misguided attempt to artificially improve the company’s financial position.
I would ask all LVT shareholders whether this is the sort of director that you would like to have going forward, with the clear answer being no, and hence to vote in particular against Annual General Meeting Resolution 1 (but also against 2, 7, 9 & 10). I would also recommend that proxy voting forms be submitted online to avoid the possibility of them being “lost in the mail”. Let’s get the ball rolling on the process of board renewal, and give ourselves a far greater chance of future company success for LVT.