Chicago Sun-Times – Insurgent shareholder William Ackman presented a new proposal to restructure McDonald’s Corp. on Wednesday — and the company rebuffed him a second time.
Ackman said Oak Brook-based McDonald’s should put its company-owned restaurants into a separate corporation, and sell 20 percent of it to public shareholders. He also proposed McDonald’s sell 1,000 company-owned stores to franchisees. The moves would benefit stockholders, he said, raising the dividend 200 percent and lifting the stock price as much as 45 percent.
“We want to unlock significant shareholder value,” Ackman told investors in New York. “What we’re trying to do is help the company reconfigure itself.”
But McDonald’s responded that it had no plans to conduct even a partial spin-off of McOpCo, the division that owns about 8,100 of its 31,700 restaurants.
Ackman’s proposal “will not deliver the value already being created by our current strategy,” Mark Kay Shaw, vice president for investor relations, said in a statement. “With his latest presentation, he has not presented anything fundamentally new beyond what we’ve discussed with him previously.”
