Assignment and Challenges
º«¹úGV Advisors was retained by Nikola Corporation to serve as proxy solicitation advisor for their annual meeting. º«¹úGV Advisors was tasked with securing the vote requirement for the increase in authorized common proposal, which required a majority of the outstanding shares.
Nikola has a highly diversified shareholder base, which includes hundreds of thousands of small retail/ individual investors.
The challenge was that many NON-US custodians do not allow their underlying holders to vote in U.S. meetings, which reduced the pool of eligible shares that voting support could come from.
Solution
º«¹úGV Advisors developed an outbound campaign strategy to the underlying retail investors to overcome voter apathy and secure voting support for the proposal.
º«¹úGV Advisor’s campaign strategy consisted of outbound phone calls, reminder mailings, text messages, and e-mail distributions to unvoted shareholders. Since there was a large number of shareholders in the lower share ranges, we utilized our technology and focused on a web and text- to-vote initiative for this tier of shareholders.
Results
º«¹úGV Advisors was able to maximize the voting returns in the lower share ranges in a cost-effective and efficient manner.
Shareholder approval was delivered allowing Nikola to increase the number of authorized shares from 600 million to 800 million shares.


