Corporate action

A corporate action is an event initiated by a public company that brings or could bring an actual change to the securities—equity or debt—issued by the company. Corporate actions are typically agreed upon by a company's board of directors and authorized by the shareholders. For some events, shareholders or bondholders are permitted to vote on the event. Examples of corporate actions include stock splits, dividends, mergers and acquisitions, rights issues, and spin-offs. Some corporate actions such as a dividend (for equity securities) or coupon payment (for debt securities) may have a direct financial impact on the shareholders or bondholders; another example is a call (early redemption) of a debt security. Other corporate actions such as stock split may have an indirect financial impact, as the increased liquidity of shares may cause the price of the stock to decrease. Some corporate actions, such as name changes or ticker symbol changes to better reflect a company's business focus, have no direct financial impact on the shareholders; securities may be listed under a different security identifier (e.g. ISIN, CUSIP, Sedol) however. For example, "Apple Computers" changed its name to Apple Inc. There are three types of corporate actions: voluntary, mandatory, and mandatory with choice. Mandatory corporate action: A mandatory corporate action is an event initiated by the board of directors of the corporation that affects all shareholders. Participation of shareholders are mandatory for these corporate actions. An example of a mandatory corporate action is cash dividend. A shareholder does not need to act to receive the dividend. Other examples of mandatory corporate actions include stock splits, mergers, pre-refunding, return of capital, bonus issue, asset ID change, and spin-offs. Strictly speaking, the word "mandatory" is not appropriate because the shareholder is not required to do anything; the shareholder is just a passive beneficiary in all the cases cited above. There is nothing the shareholder has to do or does in a Mandatory Corporate Action.