Employee shareholding

The voestalpine employee shareholding scheme developed in Austria was launched in 2001 and has now been expanded to Group companies in Germany, Great Britain, Poland, Belgium, and the Netherlands. About 100 Group companies are included in the scheme.

As of the end of the business year 2012/13, 22,400 employees hold 23 million shares of the company through the voestalpine “Mitarbeiterbeteiligung Privatstiftung.“ With a holding of 13.35% of the share capital, due to the general bundling of voting rights, employees are the second largest core shareholder of voestalpine AG.

The “Mitarbeiterbeteiligung Privatstiftung“ also manages 1.8 million private shares held by former and active Group employees; this corresponds to around 1.05% of the voting shares. Thus, currently 14.4% of voestalpine AG’s share capital is owned by its employees.

Employee participation can mean different things

In 2000, the term “employee participation“ generally meant merely profit-sharing in the form of cash payment by way of bonuses (and not much has changed since then). Employee participation at voestalpine, however, is “employee shareholding”–true equity participation, where employees share in the company’s assets.

The principle of sustainability

In order to ensure that employee shareholding remains stable in the long term, employees, as coowners of the voestalpine Group, commit themselves to retain their voestalpine shares during the entire duration of their employment by the Group. They can sell their shares only after they have left voestalpine. In recent years, a good two thirds of all employees who left the company permitted their voestalpine shares to remain in the Mitarbeiterbeteiligung Privatstiftung, the foundation that manages employee shares.

Source:
voestalpine Mitarbeiterbeteiligung Privatstiftung:
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