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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.”<\/p>\n