Shareholder
A shareholder or stockholder is an individual or company (including a
corporation) that legally owns one or more shares of stock in a joint stock
company. A company's shareholders collectively own that company. Thus, such
companies strive to enhance shareholder value.
Stockholders are granted special privileges depending on the class of stock,
including the right to vote (usually one vote per share owned) on matters
such as elections to the board of directors, the right to propose
shareholder resolutions, the right to share in distributions of the
company's income, the right to purchase new shares issued by the company,
and the right to a company's assets during a liquidation of the company.
However, stockholder's rights to a company's assets are subordinate to the
rights of the company's creditors. This means that stockholders typically
receive nothing if a company is liquidated after bankruptcy (if the company
had had enough to pay its creditors, it would not have entered bankruptcy),
although a stock may have value after a bankruptcy if there is the
possibility that the debts of the company will be restructured.
Stockholders or shareholders are considered by some to be a partial subset
of stakeholders, which may include anyone who has a direct or indirect
equity interest in the business entity or someone with even a non-pecuniary
interest in a non-profit organization. Thus it might be common to call
volunteer contributors to an association stakeholders, even though they are
not shareholders.
Although directors and officers of a company are bound by fiduciary duties
to act in the best interest of the shareholders, the shareholders themselves
normally do not have such duties towards each other.
However, in a few unusual cases, some courts have been willing to imply such
a duty between shareholders. For example, in California, majority
shareholders of closely held corporations have a duty to not destroy the
value of the shares held by minority shareholders. See Jones v. H. F.
Ahmanson & Co., 1 Cal. 3d 93 (1969) [1].
The largest shareholders (in terms of percentages of companies owned) are
often mutual funds, and especially passively managed exchange-traded funds.
From: Wikipedia
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