Introduction:
A shareholder is an individual or company that legally owns one or more shares of stock in that company. Shareholders are the owners of companies. A small business may have just one shareholder, the founder, while a public company may have thousands of individual and institutional shareholders, such as mutual fund companies, pension funds and hedge funds. Shareholders play an important role in the financing, operations, governance and control aspects of a business.
Shareholders or stockholders are the persons or firm or companies who purchase the shares of other company. They are the real owner of company. Shareholders may be preference shareholders or equity shareholders.
Equity shareholders can vote in annual general meeting for passing any resolution. Other side Preference shareholders have preference to get dividend with fixed rate before giving dividend to equity shareholders. All shareholders have to open demat account if they want to deal in shares. As shareholders are the real owner of company, if company suffers loss then shareholders have no right to get dividend. If company is liquidated, then they can receive their money only after paying external creditors and debenture holders.
Company has to maintain good relation with shareholders and try hard to bring high rate on capital which is given in the form of shares because every shareholder wants to increase his share capital.
Shareholders have to maintain their contact with different company because they are interested to invest their hard earned money in that place from where they can get high Return On Investment. They have to check the past records from company’s financial statements before investing their money. If any company wants to encourage shareholders, then it has to maintain fair and reliable financial statements and show evidence of its best performance with financial statements.
Shareholders Vs