Sept 18 (Reuters) – Activist investor Jana Partners on Friday urged Cooper Companies to launch an external search for a \u200cnew CEO and consider asset sales, arguing recent missteps \u200chave hurt investor confidence and weighed on the medical device maker’s market value. <\/p>\n
Cooper \u200bhad lowered its annual forecasts last week and ended a review of options for its CooperSurgical unit without a sale. <\/p>\n
Here are more details: <\/p>\n
\u2022 Jana asked Cooper to engage potential buyers for its contact lens \u200cunit, CooperVision, and consider \u2060a sale of fertility and medical device businesses within its CooperSurgical unit. <\/p>\n
\u2022 Cooper did not immediately respond \u2060to a Reuters request for comment. <\/p>\n
\u2022 The activist investor owns about 3.58 million shares, or 1.8% stake, in Cooper, according to its \u200blatest regulatory \u200bfiling. <\/p>\n
\u2022 JANA is also calling \u200bfor a new board chair \u200cand the addition of directors with expertise to strengthen oversight of the company. <\/p>\n
\u2022 Jana urged Cooper to link executive pay more closely to performance to boost accountability. <\/p>\n
\u2022 It also criticized Cooper’s handling of excess inventory held by customers of CooperVision. <\/p>\n
\u2022 Jana said Cooper’s \u200cshares have lagged peers and trade \u200bat a discount to comparable companies. <\/p>\n
\u2022 Shares \u200bhave fallen about 21% \u200bover the past 12 months, compared with gains \u200cof about 19% for Becton Dickinson \u200band 61% for \u200bInteger Holdings and a decline of about 17% for Alcon, according to data compiled by LSEG. <\/p>\n
\u2022 The investor also urged \u200bCooper to hire \u200can outside adviser to identify manufacturing and supply-chain cost \u200bsavings at CooperVision. <\/p>\n
(Reporting by Sahil Pandey in Bengaluru; Editing \u200bby Leroy Leo and Sahal Muhammed) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sept 18 (Reuters) – Activist investor Jana Partners on Friday urged Cooper Companies to launch an external search for a \u200cnew CEO and consider asset sales, arguing recent missteps \u200chave hurt investor confidence and weighed on the medical device maker’s market value. Cooper \u200bhad lowered its annual forecasts last week and ended a review of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-us-stocks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/btbitcoin.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/btbitcoin.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/btbitcoin.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/btbitcoin.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/btbitcoin.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1366"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/btbitcoin.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1366\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/btbitcoin.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/btbitcoin.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/btbitcoin.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}