Erasmus Students visited adidas-Hauptversammlung
Francisco Alcoba und Raúl Martínez-Avial aus Spanien sowie Andrew Bell aus dem U.K. studieren derzeit als Erasmus-Studenten an der Hochschule Coburg. Im Rahmen des Kurses „Global Markets“ von Prof. Dr. Victor J. Randall besuchten sie die Hauptversammlung von adidads. Hier ist ihr Bericht.
Visiting the adidas Annual General Meeting AGM (Hauptversammlung) has been such an instructive experience for us as Erasmus students. We have never been to an AGM of a listed stock company so everything was new, but there were several things that were particularly interesting to us.
When we arrived, we did not expect so much security at the Fürth Town Hall. As foreigners, we thought that fully understanding the formal address at the meeting may be a problem because our German is not sufficient to follow the more complex topics, but everything was prepared for people like us with translation services and headphones for the duration of the entire AGM. It was fascinating how adidas used its marketing skills to showcase some of its latest products in the hall.
Another thing that caught our attention was the fact of marketing the annual results and figures via an impressive spectrum of multi-media display; it was like an effective advertisement from the company – only that they were introducing their financials for 2011 and 1st quarter 2012.
We also found it interesting, how the subject of female representation in German business was raised by a shareholder representative from the association of German female lawyers and this didn’t seem to have much impact on the all-male board!
Finally, it was amazing how shareholders’ representatives expressed their thoughts and how they argued with the managers during the debate time to achieve and understanding t how their money was being invested and how could they could extract even more profitability.
We think the AGM visit has been a valuable and unique opportunity for us and we doubt if our home university could have arranged something like this! The whole student exchange and Erasmus program has been extremely fascinating to us and given us a great opportunity to experience German culture.