Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the NVE Virtual Annual Meeting of Shareholders conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star zero. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Mr. Dan Baker, President and CEO. Thank you. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you, Daphne. Good afternoon, thank you for attending our 2020 Virtual Annual Meeting of Shareholders. This meeting is being held by telephone and electronic communication as described in our proxy statement and permitted under Minnesota business law and NVE's bylaws as amended effective May 6th, 2020. A replay will be available on our website. We're sorry we're unable to have an in-person annual meeting this year. Of course, health and safety is our primary concern. On the call co-hosting this meeting with me are Curt Reynders, our CFO, Secretary, and Inspector of Elections; Terry Glarner, our Chairman; Pat Hollister, our Audit Committee Chair; Rich Kramp, Director; Gary Maharaj, Director; and Rich Lehman, partner with Boulay PLLP, our registered public accounting firm. All of us will be available to answer questions during the Q&A session.
Our agenda this afternoon is a formal vote on the items in our proxy statement. I'll give a brief business overview, and we'll open the call to questions. I hereby call the formal meeting to order and call on Mr. Reynders to present proof of the due calling of this meeting. Curt?
As of June 12th, 2020, which is the date of record for determining those shareholders eligible to vote, there were 4,835,038 shares of common stock of the company outstanding and entitled to vote. We have an affidavit that the notice of this meeting and the proxy statement were mailed to the shareholders of record on June 22nd, 2020, and a report from Broadridge Financial Solutions that our materials or notices of internet availability for the materials were sent to our shareholders who held their shares in street name. A majority of the outstanding shares of common stock entitled to vote are required to constitute a quorum. Proxies indicating abstention from a vote and broker non-votes are counted toward determining whether there is a quorum.
We have represented by proxy today the holders of more than 50% of the shares outstanding on the record date. We have a quorum.
On the basis of Curt's report, I declare the meeting to be duly called and convened and competent to proceed to conduct business. The notice of this meeting and proxy statement are available on our website at www.nve.com/annualreports if anyone would like to refer to them. As a matter of good corporate practice, each of our directors stands for election each year, and we submit our auditors for ratification.
We have three formal items of business: to elect five directors to serve until the next annual meeting of shareholders, to consider advisory approval of the named executive officer compensation, and to ratify the selection of Boulay PLLP as our independent registered public accounting firm for the fiscal year ending March 31st, 2021. The director nominees are all of our incumbent directors and are designated and listed in the proxy statement, and we're all on this call.
No other director candidates were nominated, and no shareholder proposals were submitted, so there are no other agenda items. In accordance with Minnesota business law, the affirmative vote of a plurality of the voting power of common stock, represented by proxy or by telephone and entitled to vote, is required to approve Proposal 1, that is director election, and the affirmative vote of a majority of the voting power is required to approve Proposal Three, the ratification of our independent registered public accounting firm. Typically, our shareholders vote in advance via mail, internet, or telephone, but if anyone is voting now, please email an image of your proxy and a government-issued form of photo ID to investor@nve.com.
The image should be of a proxy from us with a label indicating your shareholder number and the number of shares held, if you are a shareholder of record, or a form called a legal proxy you could have requested from Broadridge if you hold your shares in street name. We'll allow a few minutes if anyone is voting now, and in the meantime, I'll give an overview of our business. Hands-on product demos have been a popular feature of our annual meetings, our in-person annual meetings.
We have a playlist of videos of the demos we were planning to have at this meeting, which you can find on our YouTube channel at youtube.com/nvecorporation. We also posted a link in our Twitter timeline. Our mission is to be leaders in practical spintronics. Our strategy is to provide best-in-class sensors to acquire data and couplers to transmit data.
We're targeting the Internet of Things, including factory automation and medical devices. We have a number of demonstrations of sensors, couplers, and of the Internet of Things. Two sensor illustrations are on the playlist for this meeting: Smart Sensors intrusion detection, and a limit switch. Intrusion detection is the familiar form of proximity sensing. Unlike ordinary electromechanical sensors that we have in many of our homes for alarm systems and so forth, our new Smart Sensors allow many sensors to be easily connected. We demonstrated this using a little Lego house, an alarm sounds if a door opens. That's one of the videos on the playlist. Proximity sensors are also essential for factory automation. We have several demonstrations of our Smart Sensors with pneumatic cylinders, which are the common actuators or muscles in industrial robots.
In a demo on our playlist, we stop an actuator just short of an egg, showing the precision and flexibility of our Smart Sensors. We also show our new Smart Sensor ecosystem, including breakout boards and programmers. How do sensors support the industrial Internet of Things? We did a demonstration of the Internet of Things using a chessboard as a metaphor. In this video, we use a smart chessboard as a metaphor for the Internet of Things or IoT. Ubiquitous sensors are key to the IoT. IoT architecture includes arrays of sensors and possibly actuators, which are called end nodes. The chessboard uses 64 of our sensors to detect chess pieces on each of the possible squares where the pieces could be. The sensor nodes are aggregated by edge computers, which operate in real-time close to the nodes.
In our demonstration, we used an inexpensive Arduino single board computer to aggregate sensor outputs and produce human-readable results. Artificial intelligence could be used with this aggregated data to make move recommendations, define strategies, or analyze games. The chessboard is analogous to an industrial Internet of Things factory, where ubiquitous sensors keep track of parts, edge computers summarize the information and pass it on to other computers to adapt in real time to the things like process drift, tool wear, or customers' buying behavior to make factories that are more efficient with fewer people. The COVID-19 pandemic has increased interest in factory automation. The second part of our Internet of Things strategy is couplers to transmit data with spintronic couplers. Those can be used to transmit data such as sensor data between IoT nodes.
We demonstrated our couplers by sending information between two laptops using RS-485, which is a common industrial network. The demonstration, which is part of that playlist, also uses couplers with transceivers, plus our new DC-to-DC converters. Until recently, our coupler products transferred only data. The new product line also transfers power for industrial Internet of Things networks. We introduced a standalone DC-to-DC converter, which we bill as the world's smallest device of its type, at less than one-eighth by one-quarter of an inch. The final demonstration on our playlist shows that part. We connected a DC-to-DC converter directly to line voltage, which would be dangerous and not something you'd want to hook up to a computer. We show that by using an electrician's tester to show how there are dangerous voltages on our part's input, but not on the output.
By the way, I was willing to risk my life to prove it by touching the output. In the past year, we leveraged our leadership in practical spintronics with a number of new products in our strategy to target the large, fast-growing Internet of Things market. Back to the voting. We haven't had anyone vote in real time here. Curt, do you have a tally?
The voting report shows the following results. For item one, each director nominee received in their favor 91% of the shares voted. On item two, 98% of the shares voted to approve named executive officer compensation. On item three, 99% of the shares voted were in favor of the ratification of the selection of Boulay PLLP as our independent registered public accounting firm.
On the basis of the voting, then, I declare that each director nominee has been reelected, named executive officer compensation has been approved, and the selection of our independent registered public accounting firm has been ratified. We will file a vote report and a current report on Form 8-K within four business days as required. There's no other formal business. I declare the formal meeting adjourned and will open the meeting to questions. If you're listening online and want to ask a question, you can call in to area code 973-638-3208 or toll-free 877-303-6919 in the U.S. That's 973-638-3208 or 877-303-6919. Daphne, do we have any questions?
At this time, as a reminder, to ask a question, press star one on your telephone. To withdraw your question, press the pound key. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Again, in order to ask a question, press star one on your telephone. And you have no questions at this time.
Well, if there are no questions, thank you for participating in our meeting, or at least listening to it. We look forward to our next regular earnings call, which will be in October. Stay safe, everyone, and thank you again.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.