Verizon reclaims US wireless stake for $130B

Verizon will own its wireless business outright after agreeing Monday to pay $130 billion for the 45 percent stake in Verizon Wireless owned by British cellphone carrier Vodafone.

Dell to go private in $24.4B deal led by founder (Update 3)

Slumping personal computer maker Dell is bowing out of the stock market in a $24.4 billion buyout that represents the largest deal of its kind since the Great Recession dried up the financing for such risky maneuvers.

HP's missteps culminate in loss of 27,000 jobs (Update)

(AP) -- Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman has quantified the painful price that must be paid for the missteps of her predecessors as she tries to turn around the Silicon Valley pioneer. The bungling will wipe out 27,000 jobs ...

SAP to buy Ariba for $4.5B, extending cloud push

(AP) -- Business software maker SAP AG on Tuesday said it will buy Ariba Inc., which makes Web-based software that connects suppliers and buyers online, for about $4.51 billion.

Facebook investors to cash out more shares

(AP) -- Insiders and early Facebook investors will be unloading more of their shares in the initial public offering, the company said Wednesday, as they take advantage of investor demand.

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Shareholder

A mutual shareholder or stockholder is an individual or company (including a corporation) that legally owns one or more shares of stock in a joint stock company. A company's shareholders collectively own that company. Thus, the typical goal of such companies is to enhance shareholder value.

Stockholders are granted special privileges depending on the class of stock. These rights may include:

However, stockholder's rights to a company's assets are subordinate to the rights of the company's creditors. This means that stockholders typically receive nothing if a company is liquidated after bankruptcy (if the company had had enough to pay its creditors, it would not have entered bankruptcy), although a stock may have value after a bankruptcy if there is the possibility that the debts of the company will be restructured.

Stockholders or shareholders are considered by some to be a partial subset of stakeholders, which may include anyone who has a direct or indirect equity interest in the business entity or someone with even a non-pecuniary interest in a non-profit organization. Thus it might be common to call volunteer contributors to an association stakeholders, even though they are not shareholders.

Although directors and officers of a company are bound by fiduciary duties to act in the best interest of the shareholders, the shareholders themselves normally do not have such duties towards each other.

However, in a few unusual cases, some courts have been willing to imply such a duty between shareholders. For example, in California, majority shareholders of closely held corporations have a duty to not destroy the value of the shares held by minority shareholders.

The largest shareholders (in terms of percentage owned of companies) are often mutual funds, especially passively managed exchange-traded funds[citation needed].

Shareholders play an important role in raising capital for organizations. So these figures pose a great opportunity for all those who are looking for a lucrative option to invest money. Companies typically provide all the necessary proofs to shareholders to show that they are investing at a right place. For example, fair and reliable audit figures from income statement and balance sheet are used as evidence of overall performance for the benefit of shareholders.

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