International News

SEOUL (APP/AFP) – Samsung Electronics
responded warily Thursday to a plan submitted by the US activist hedge fund Elliott Management for splitting the South Korean electronics giant into a separate holding and operating company.
“We will carefully review the shareholders’ proposals,” the
technology conglomerate said in a terse one-line statement, with its spokesmen declining any further comment.
Entities controlled by Elliott, the hedge fund run by billionaire
Paul Singer, own about 0.62 percent of Samsung.
In a detailed proposal unveiled on Wednesday, Elliott laid out a
strategy for streamlining Samsung, splitting the company in two, dual-listing the resulting operating company on a US exchange and paying shareholders a special dividend of 30 trillion won ($27 billion).
Elliott argued that Samsung, currently a maze of listed and unlisted
companies with a notoriously opaque ownership and management structure, had
suffered from a long-term undervaluation in the equity market.
Samsung shares surged as much as 5.0 percent in morning trade on the
South Korean stock exchange.
Elliott’s proposal comes at a sensitive time for Samsung, which is in
the middle of a leadership succession and struggling with an unprecedented global recall of some 2.5 million Galaxy Note 7s after the smartphones were found to have faulty batteries.