Your shares, your say: ensuring retail investors are heard

Many of our shareholders are retail investors. But when it's time to vote on issues important to their investments very few do. Why? Because reading all those shareholder proposals takes too much time so they often settle for silence instead of being heard.

At ExxonMobil, just one in four individual investors votes on proxy proposals. Nearly 40% of our shares are held by retail investors, but we don't hear from 75% of them during proxy season.

This is a gap we want to close. Across corporate America, retail investors' voices are often not heard. This is because individual investors lack access to numerous services that make voting fast and easy for larger institutional investors. Activist groups often exploit this gap to push political goals at the expense of shareholder value.

The average retail investor would have had to dedicate a year of full-time work to briefly study and vote on each of the roughly 28,000 items in the proxies of the companies in the Russell 3000 in 2024 - and that's assuming that they spent only 5 minutes on each item.

As a matter of fairness, it's time to level the playing field.

Main street investors matter, especially when their savings for a home, education, and retirement are at stake.

For decades, institutional investors have received help from proxy advisory firms during voting season. Retail investors have had to go it alone.

But voting techniques are evolving, and there are now at least two types of "pass-through voting" through which investors can enlist other people to vote for them.

Several large institutional investors now offer their clients a "vote with the board" option that, once selected, essentially automates decision-making going forward.

As You Sow, an activist group and serial proponent, has for several years now run As You Vote - a progressive proxy voting service that recruits shareholders and automatically votes their shares in alignment with its agenda.

Our retail shareholders, who overwhelmingly support our board, have not had the benefit of such a service and, as a result, have for far too long been underrepresented at shareholder meetings. But that will soon change.

In the coming weeks, we will introduce a completely voluntary voting option for our retail investors. Our opt-in program will make it easy for them to speak up, be heard, and be counted.

And our service will come with extra protections. Retail investors will still receive proxy materials, retain the right to opt out of automatic voting at any time, free of charge, and have the right to override any votes cast on their behalf during proxy season that they disagree with.

What follows next will be an important step forward for American shareholder democracy.

When retail investors don't vote, shareholder feedback to the board is incomplete and missing a crucial component. We know these investors rely on our dividend for income, and we always seek to make decisions with their needs in mind. With more of them voting, this service will help the board make more informed decisions.

Activist groups holding few if any shares have, over the past decade, filed numerous dissident proposals that openly sought to shrink our company's core business to the detriment of long-term value.

Retail investors deserve to be heard. They didn't buy our stock to sit on the sidelines. They bought it because they want strong shareholder returns, and they deserve a say in the company they own and the future they are funding.