Featured Articles

Consequently, the importance of management ethics and guiding principles they uphold in order to serve the interests of shareholders and other stakeholders are often overlooked.  Shareholders sometimes fail to understand and trust the management simply because managers have not communicated their values and actions appropriately.  In the future, I believe the focus will be more on building and maintaining a mutual trust between managers and shareholders through improved dialogue. 

What opportunities do you see for foreign companies looking to provide their services to the corporate governance landscape in Japan?

Seta:  We certainly consider voting to be an important activity of shareholders.  Shareholders have an obligation to support management wherever possible.  Voting is a very tangible expression of that support. 

But by no means is voting activity adequate on its own.  The intermediaries—the voting services, the information providers—play an important role in facilitating adequate information exchange and also to facilitate obligations to be carried out both by the shareholders and also by the companies.  And if they are good intermediaries, they also facilitate information to enable managers and shareholders to understand each other.

The views expressed in this article are not necessarily those of JETRO.