Electronic Arts shareholders voted against the company’s executive compensation plan. While it is rare to vote “no,” this has happened to EA’s pay plan for the second year in a row.
The vote is non-binding, but the company did reconsider its compensation plan after the 2020 vote. No special equity awards were granted in fiscal 2021. Moreover, EA recently said it was forgoing special stock awards to its top executives through 2026.
EA shareholders include Trillium Asset Management, Calvert Investments, New York City Funds, CalSTRS and Calpers, and the SOC Investment Group (formerly known as CtW Investment Group). The latter has also been criticizing huge payments to Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick for a few years. In 2020, they called on the corporations to change the way they think about compensating their executives.
“We’re in regular conversations with our stockholders on a wide variety of issues, and we value the feedback that we receive,” EA responded. The company acknowledged that it “didn’t achieve the results we would have liked.”