Ralph Nader, the consumer activist and longtime shareholder in Cisco Systems Inc., has had enough.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Nader sent a letter to Cisco CEO John Chambers on June 13 scolding him for the company's performance and asking for some of the company's cash hoard in the form of dividends.
The San Jose company's shares (NASDAQ:CSCO) are 80 percent below where they were at the height of the dot-com bubble in 2000 and are down about a third in the past 12 months, a time that the Nasdaq Composite Index is up about 20 percent.
"It is time for a long-overdue Cisco shareholder revolt against a management that is oblivious to building or even maintaining shareholder value," Nader wrote in his letter.
He isn't an uninterested observer of the Cisco stock meltdown, either. Nader owns 18,000 shares that have dropped in value from about $1 million in the dot-com days to about $270,000 today.
Cisco's cash on hand is about $43 billion, which Nader would like to see distributed in a one-time $1-a-share payout followed by an increase in the annual dividend to 50 cents a share from the current 24 cents.
A Cisco spokeswoman told the Journal that the company welcomes input from shareholders and it is considering "capital allocation and returns to our shareholders." No specifics were offered and the spokeswoman added that all but about $5 billion of the company's cash is tied up in foreign earnings, much of which would be lost to taxes if it was brought back to the U.S. to be used in the way that Nader suggests.
Chambers has been trying to turn around the networking equipment maker in recent months after admitting that it was sidetracked by an attempt to get into consumer electronics.
Written by Cromwell Schubarth. Contact him at 408.299.1823 or cschubarth@bizjournals.com.