BHP AGM and a long day

Today was a special day indeed. I attended the Annual General Meeting of BHP Biliton Limited, which is Australia's largest company. The reason I got to attend it was because I am a shareholder. I have made alot of money on their shares and hopefully in the future would continue to make. So in the morning I got up early, and met my friend Wei Yan at the bus stop at around 8.20. We hopped on the 304 together and away to the city we went. Upon arriving at the city we realised we were too early and so went to Maccas to eat breakfast. We had a good chat over breakfast and so decided to head off. We caught tram 70 from Flinders street towards Wattle Park. We arrived at the Hisense Arena (which was originally Vodafone Arena). We had to walk abit before finally reaching the Melbourne Park Function Centre, our destination and the place I sat for my UMAT 2 years ago!

This is the registration desk. BHP appointed another company called Computershare to manage their registration.

They had a beautiful display of cups with orange juice and water to serve shareholders.

This is the view outside the function centre. Pretty good view, and next door is the place where they have the Australian Open tournament every year in January.

This is me grinning away at such an opportunity to come to the country's biggest company's AGM.

There were also some demonstrators outside which disagreed with some of BHP's actions as polluting the area around some of their mines.

We weren't allowed, however, to take pictures inside the function room where the actual AGM was held. Nevertheless, it was an exciting event. Each director had to offer himself to be re-elected and new directors had to be elected. So each director was given a 2 minute opportunity to talk about himself to convince shareholders to vote him onto the board. We were all given a green piece of paper to submit and record our votes down. It was a new experience to me. It was the first time I had seen activisit shareholders ask so many awkward yet truthful questions. Some of them was really hilarious. Like when the matter had to deal with remuneration of directors or asking the directors to give a "special dividend" as a Christmas present for all shareholders. The directors politely declined to the second request.

After 3 hours of event, we finished it with satisfied hearts and we headed back to Melbourne Central. I then had lunch with Audrey and Sue Ann at Stalactites, a greek restaurant in Lonsdale Street. We had Souvlaki, their most famous dish. Tasted alright, but the chicken kept on falling out of the souvlaki onto the plate. Really difficult to eat it.

Later on in the day, I went back to Nandos to go for some training they had for me. Then had dinner with Sing Yao, Tasia and Jessica. I made friends with Jessica today, haven't actually met her before.

Then at night, went back to the city to have a meeting with Kenjisan Investments officers. we discussed all the relevant matters for 2008 as this was our final meeting. We had an extensive review of our portfolio and decided on changes to be made. Everything went well and by the time I reached home it was already 12 midnight and here I am writing this post to you.

What a long day. :)