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Kenya: It's a Talk in the Park for AccessKenya Investors
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Business Daily (Nairobi)
8 May 2008
Posted to the web 8 May 2008
Kui Kinyanjui
More popular as a weekend jaunt for the romantic and lately, musically inclined members of Nairobi society, yesterday's AccessKenya's annual general meeting gave the wooded Arboretum park a more sober aspect.
Nearly 27,000 shareholders converged on the 100-year old leafy park, keen to take part in the firms's first AGM since its listing last year.
Most listed Kenyan companies traditionally chose venues such as the Bomas of Kenya, Kenyatta International Conference Centre and more upscale hotels to hold AGMs. The Access Kenya AGM will make history as the first by a listed company to be held in a park.
"This was a unique choice geared towards furthering our Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) goals," said the company's corporate communications manager, Nancy Imunde.
She said the money spent hiring the venue would go towards the park's conservation efforts, as well as offer the company the opportunity to cut costs by half for venue hiring.
Apart from its yesterday's unique choice of a meeting venue, Access Kenya is set to challenge more norms dictating typical AGM etiquette for Kenyan companies.
Hoping to lower the cost of communicating to its shareholders, the company was the first to introduce email communications, a move that is set to be imitated by companies such as Safaricom as it considers communicating via email and SMS after listing in June.
Companies often spend millions communicating with their share-holders. KenGen, with 250,000 shareholders, has in the past spent over Sh25 million producing annual reports and with a further Sh17 million on postage.
"We expect that we will be able to communicate with at least 25 per cent of our shareholders using the email medium. Shareholders who did not tick the box on our application form will continue to receive information by post although we will work to convert them to email," said Mr David Somen, group executive director of AccessKenya in a previous interview.
In future, technology is expected to further lower the cost of communicating with shareholders as companies move to use video conferencing and the Internet to save up to 40 per cent in AGM related costs.
The move would mean shareholders would no longer have to travel to a single destination to participate in an AGM as they would access proceedings through an Internet link. Kengen once spent over Sh80 million in a single day organising its AGM.
The ICT firm announced a dividend of about Sh 61 million to its shareholders and also got the greenlight to double its current capital share. The company's capital share currently stands at Sh 250 million. The money will be raised through bonus split or share splits to be announced later.
According to Mr Somen, the shareholders will be entitled to Sh0.30 per share. The dividends will be paid in a month's time.
The possibility of the company entering into another acquisition deal also moved a notch higher after the shareholders approved Sh200 million for an acquisition.
Jonathan Somen, group managing director, said the company is already talking to three companies which he would not mention at the moment.
Despite the political violence witnessed in the country at the beginning of the year, the executive director said the company will still meet this year's growth projection of between 50 and 60 per cent.
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The employees of AccessKenya are also set to benefit following a resolution that 2.75 million new ordinary shares of Sh1 will be reserved for employees. This approval now brings the total share allotment to the employees at Sh10 million.
The need for the increase for employee's allotment, according to executive director, is motivated by the need to retain and motivate the employees in the company.
"The growth of the IT industry Kenya has lead to shift of employees from one company to another but am happy that so far we have not been affected, " he said.
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