Hello, welcome to another MLEX podcast. I'm James Panicki. Mlex's Australasian managing editor. I'm speaking to you from our offices in Melbourne.

And what a time to be alive for reporters of

shareholder activism, particularly those based here in the sunburnt country, where the

boardroom fight over how best to turn around one of the country's most iconic retailers,

Maya, was this week marked by an unexpected plot twist.

Meyer's sales have been sliding of late, and there are no major surprises there, given that

bricks and mortar retailers around the world are coming under increased pressure from

online competition.

But the company's poor performance has added steam to the campaign of billionaire investor

Solomon Liu, who's been agitating for board change through a conglomerate premier

investments since 2017. And up to this point where in shareholder activist 101 territory,

nothing too surprising there. But then another investor shows up, spicing things up further, but not in a way that

Solomon Liu would necessarily appreciate. Laurel Henning is an M-Lex senior reporter. She's covering

Asia Pacific shareholder activism and she's doing it from Sydney. Hello, Laurel. Hi, James.

Now walk me through these developments one step at a time.

What triggered the most recent round of upheaval? Sure. So on the 12th of September, Maya

published its results for its financial year ending July 28th. And they were not good. Those

results showed a 3.2% drop in sales for the year from, in Australian

dollars, 3.2 billion, which is 2.3 billion US dollars to 3.1 billion Australian. And gross

profit had declined 2.9% from 1.2 billion Australian to 1.18 billion over the same period. The results, as you've

mentioned, reignited criticism from Myers' activist shareholders, Solomon Liu. He's not your

stereotypical activist shareholder because he heads up his own retail conglomerate, but in terms

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