Pittsburg, CA 94565
November 3, 2014
Via email to:
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
Division of Corporation Finance
Office of Chief Counsel
100 F Street, NE
Washington, DC 20549-2736
Re: Shareholder Proposal
of Jing Zhao for Inclusion in Apple 2015 Proxy
Statement
Ladies and Gentlemen:
It is a
surprise that rather than communicating with its shareholders on important
corporate policy issues, Apple Inc. wasted the company’s resource to hire an
outside law firm against its shareholder.
This is another indication that Apple needs improve its public policy.
There is no
need to use common sense to rebut the impermissibly irrelevant cases and misleading
statements in
the October 31, 2014 letter to the SEC prepared by Hogan Lovells US LLP. However, to prevent the company’s Board from
repeating the same misleading statements from the letter in their predictable
Opposition Statement against my proposal in the proxy material, I would like to
point out some basic facts here.
1.
Every proposal deals with matters relating to the
company’s business operation more or less, but this is not the reason to
exclude a proposal. Otherwise, every
company can use this excuse to exclude any proposal. My proposal does not seek to “micro-manage”
the company on a day-to-day basis, because it focuses on social policy issues.
2.
The letter failed to show that the company has
substantially implemented my proposal. In
fact, the company’s failures on these social policy issues have been widely
known. For example, here is one independent research of the
company’s conducts: Jenny Chan, Ngai Pun and Mark Selden, "The politics of
global production: Apple, Foxconn and China's new working class," The
Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 32, No. 2, August 12, 2013. If Apple
is willing to improve its policy, at least it should learn from a better EICC
fellow member Hewlett-Packard: HP respected shareholders’ right to vote on my
similar proposal in 2013 and also changed its supplier chain policy.
3.
My proposal does not
deal with substantially the same subject matter as a previous proposal; it
includes much wider social issues besides human rights. Since the much narrower proposal on human
rights issue only received 5.716% vote, it is highly possible that much more
shareholders will support my proposal.
I submitted
my proposal very early on April 22, 2014 to give the company enough time to
communicate with its shareholders, because I had a bad experience to be
rejected to communicate with the company. I am citing my letter to the company on February
27, 2013 after I was denied the right to speak at the shareholders meeting last
year: “It is sad that the meeting was not properly conducted by you. Mr. Sewell
allowed one shareholder to speak after the first proposal was introduced but
denied me the opportunity to speak after the number 6 human rights proposal was
presented. This is unfair, undemocratic and a clear violation to shareholder’s
right.”
Finally, I
will respect the result of my fellow shareholders after the voting of my
proposal, and will continue to hold the company’s shares until the company
respects shareholder’s right to submit a proposal to be voted at the annual
shareholders meeting.
Should you have any questions,
please contact me at 925-643-xxxx (phone/fax)
or zhao.cpri@gmail.com.
Respectfully,
Jing Zhao, Sr. Fellow
US-Japan-China Comparative Policy
Research Institute
Cc: Levoff, Dye
| 
