While NLPC reached an agreement with Apple last month to withdraw its shareholder proposal that sought to address the incongruence between the company’s climate targets and its growing demand for electricity to meet data center expansion, that doesn’t mean we won’t have a voice addressing matters considered at the annual meeting on February 24.
Late last month we circulated a report to our fellow shareowners that called for them to vote in favor of Proposal No. 5, sponsored by the National Center for Public Policy Research, which requests Apple’s board of directors to conduct a “China Entanglement Audit.” An excerpt from our report:
Apple Inc. is currently a captive of its own Chinese manufacturing base. Proposal No. 5 … is a common-sense request for transparency that would allow shareholders to evaluate the true risks of their investment.
Without this report, investors are left with a materially misleading picture of a company that claims to be “American” and “diversifying” while remaining fundamentally tethered to the CCP’s political and economic whims. The potential for sudden, catastrophic loss—whether through tariffs, IP theft, or geopolitical conflict—is too high for the Board to continue hiding behind generic disclosures.
As our report mentions, NLPC presented a not-dissimilar “Communist China Risk Audit” proposal at Apple’s annual meeting in 2023, and a “Congruency Report on Privacy and Human Rights” proposal in 2024, that also addressed many salient points related to the company’s business activities in China. Both proposals received a lot of media attention — links to those news stories can be found on our proposal tracker.
NCPPR’s Proposal No. 5 can be found on Page 75 of Apple’s 2026 proxy statement. We urge the company’s shareholders to vote in favor of it.
(PHOTO: Apple CEO Tim Cook visiting a Foxconn assembly plant in China).
