Assignment and Challenges
Alliance Advisors was retained by Nikola Corporation to serve as proxy solicitation advisor for their annual meeting. Alliance Advisors was tasked with securing the vote requirement for the increase in authorized common proposal, which required a majority of the outstanding shares.
Nikola has a highly diversified shareholder base, which includes hundreds of thousands of small retail/ individual investors.
The challenge was that many NON-US custodians do not allow their underlying holders to vote in U.S. meetings, which reduced the pool of eligible shares that voting support could come from.
Solution
Alliance Advisors developed an outbound campaign strategy to the underlying retail investors to overcome voter apathy and secure voting support for the proposal.
Alliance Advisor’s campaign strategy consisted of outbound phone calls, reminder mailings, text messages, and e-mail distributions to unvoted shareholders. Since there was a large number of shareholders in the lower share ranges, we utilized our technology and focused on a web and text- to-vote initiative for this tier of shareholders.
Results
Alliance Advisors was able to maximize the voting returns in the lower share ranges in a cost-effective and efficient manner.
Shareholder approval was delivered allowing Nikola to increase the number of authorized shares from 600 million to 800 million shares.