Last year, 80 percent of Protein Design Labs’ shareholders opposed the company’s 10-year stock plan. So this year, the biotech company came back with a newly proposed equity compensation plan at its annual meeting, and it passed. The major difference between the two years? The new plan is less dilutive overall.
According to the Investor Responsibility Research Center, PDL’s latest plan would create a total overhang of 22.5 percent, versus the 27.9 percent that would have been created by last year’s plan. “That was the No. 1 objection from shareholders,” confirms a Protein Design spokesman. That’s despite the fact that the new stock plan would create higher total overhang than its peer group’s median of 19 percent.
