For those who may not be familiar, Footnoted is a website devoted to corporate SEC filings. Michelle Leder and her staff dig through filings for interesting disclosures amongst the corporate boilerplate. Today she posted about how corporations have been including the Japanese disaster in their filings. There have been 48 already!
As we’ve footnoted before, anytime there’s a large event — whether it’s political unrest in Egypt or the Deepwater Horizon disaster last year, it’s a sure bet that sooner or later, it will wind up in the filings. In the case of the situation with Japan, which happened on March 11, it’s clearly sooner. On Friday, AU Optronics (AUO) was the first company to mention the earthquake in Japan (they were so early, there was no tsunami yet) filing this 6-K last Friday. Then on Monday, Sony (SNE), Hitachi (HIT) and Texas Instruments (TXN) began to trickle in with their filings. Toyota waited until Tuesday to file this 6-K which expressed the company’s “most sincere sympathy” and that car production would stop for three days. In its third quarter earnings releasethis morning, FedEx (FDX) said that “the near-term impact of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan on operational costs, shipping patterns and the global economy is currently uncertain.”
But some of the companies mentioning the problems in Japan have been a bit unusual. Yesterday, Herman Miller (MLHR) filed this 8-K with its third-quarter earnings and wrapped the disaster along with several other world events as potential threats to economic stability: “However, the devastating earthquake in Japan, political unrest around the globe, and rapidly rising commodity costs make clear the many risks still facing the broader economy”. And Corning (GLW) first mentioned the situation in this proxy.
