Good morning. Good morning to all of you. If I can ask you in the next minute or so, if you could get your seat, that would be terrific, and we can get our meeting started. What a lovely spot to have an annual meeting. The sun coming in, or the clouds, at least right now, but it's a beautiful spot to be here. Great. Thank you all. Let me get started. I've got a script to read, and I'll try to stick to it, but if I wander off of it, don't worry, I'll come back. Thank you all for joining us this morning. My name is Bill Ryan. I'm the Chairman of the Board of Unum Group, and on behalf of the Board of Directors sitting in front of us here, I'm welcoming you to the 2015 annual meeting of the shareholders of Unum Group.
Some of you probably have a long history with our company, that's great. Some of you can remember annual meetings that were a little more interesting, I guess, would be the perspective I've seen over the years. I think you're like us. The last few meetings have been the kind of meetings that we love to have. This is with the performance you're going to hear about the company. That's the kind of meeting I hope we'll have today. Before we start today's meeting, I'd like to introduce you to our Directors. What I'd like them to do is as I read their names, that I'd ask them to stand quickly so they can be recognized. Theo Bunting, Michael Caulfield, Cynthia Egan, Pam Godwin, Kevin Kabat, Tim Keaney, Tom Kinser, Gloria Larson, Pat McMillan, Rick McKenney.
By the way, Rick's appreciating this meeting more than most of us, as you can probably imagine. Ed Muhl, Ron O'Hanley. Ron, you may not recognize, he's the newest of our Directors, and this is his first annual meeting. Ron's having a good month, too. He was just named CEO of State Street Global Advisors, and we're really happy to have him on our Board. Certainly, last but not least, Tom Watjen. Sometimes you forget those names after a couple of days. Unfortunately, one of our Directors, Ron Goldsberry, can't be here, and Ron's been a Director of the company for many years. He had an operation that was fairly serious in the last few days, and I can tell you that he's doing very well as a result of that operation. He'd love to be here for two reasons.
He loves the annual meeting. Secondly, he's retiring from our Board after this meeting. He's been a great Director. He and Pat McMillan have served as Directors probably for 100 years, it seems, because when we want to talk about anything in the past, we just ask Pat or Ron. They were Directors during those good and bad periods of time. Let's start today's meeting. What we have is a number of voting items that are standard for every annual meeting of every company. Listed on the front of your agenda card, followed by a review of 2014 by Tom Watjen. Then Rick McKenney, our President, will do a presentation. That's going to be what we do, a few presentations. I'll come back up and ask for any questions of shareholders.
We just ask you to look at that card to familiarize yourself with how you'll be able to ask questions and how we should handle this from that standpoint. I'm the Chairman. I'll preside over the meeting. Susan Roth, who is here, is our Secretary. I can't pass the opportunity to tell you how happy I have been working with Susan Roth. She's just been a terrific Secretary of our company. She's been somebody we go to get information that's important for the decisions we make, and she's retiring from the company after this annual meeting. Susan, thank you for a great career at Unum. We really appreciate all you've done. Thank you very much. Also, Lisa Iglesias is our General Counsel, will serve as parliamentarian. Lisa is fairly new to the company. Lisa, would you just stand so everybody sees you? Thank you.
Thank you very much. Computershare Trust Company is serving as the inspectors of election. Young woman right here is serving as our Computershare representative. Let's move forward. We finished the proxy materials to our shareholders of record as of March 26th, then sent them out on or around April 9th of 2015. On the record date, there were, wow, 249,481,644 shares of common stock outstanding in our company. According to the inspectors of election, a majority of these shares are represented at this meeting in person or usually by proxy. Therefore, a quorum is present. Now I'm going to call the meeting to order. The polls for the voting in person. By the way, most people vote proxy. Some people may want to vote in person. The polls for voting in person opened this morning at 9:45 A.M.
Shareholders in this room still have the option of voting by paper ballot. If you've already voted by proxy, you don't have to worry about voting. If you do want to vote by a paper ballot, if you'd raise your hand now, we'll get somebody to give you a paper ballot. Is there anybody wishing to vote now? Thank you. Now that we have no paper ballots, let the record reflect the fact that the polls are now closed. We've had the elections, and they are closed. The inspectors of elections have performed an initial count of all the votes cast by proxy for this meeting, and I will now give you the preliminary vote results. The final results will be reported in a Form 8-K, which will be filed no later than May 28th. Item one of our votes.
First item of business is the election of directors. Each nominee received a number of votes for his or her election, representing more than a majority of the votes cast. Therefore, I'm pleased to say each nominee was easily elected on their votes. No problem at all from the directors' standpoint there. Second item of business is the advisory vote to approve executive compensation. It's commonly known as s ay- on-p ay. This vote has come in with 69.28% of the shares voted for approval of our executive compensation program. That item passes. That's an advisory vote anyway. There was no issue either way. Item three is the third item, is the ratification of the appointment of Ernst & Young LLP as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for 2015. Representatives of EY are present and are prepared to answer any appropriate questions.
Are there any questions of our auditors, EY? Thank you. Mark, you got off easy today, wherever you are. Thank you. This is always an interesting vote, and I think the accountants will get a big head over these votes. The inspectors of election report that 98.58% of the shares were voted for ratification of EY to be our accountants. Management report. Before I turn the microphone over to our CEO, Tom Watjen, I'd like to share some thoughts about our 2014 performance and also about the leadership transition that we're going through at this time. This past year was another very successful year for Unum. Rick will highlight some of the specifics for you. I'd like to note that our earnings per share and almost any other measurement of our company's performance has been very strong.
We're a good company, we're a strong company, we're a company with strong values, and we're a company that seems to be able to work hard, do the right thing, and get recognized for its performance. Culture of the company is very important to all of us. When you look at it, though, there are still two items that we have to keep working on. One is our long-term care or closed block business. That's a business that Wall Street has not found a way to get comfortable with just yet. The second thing we have little control over, it's low interest rates. If you're an insurance company with low interest rates in the environment, it makes it hard to earn a lot of money off of your investment portfolio.
Wall Street tends to, in a low rate environment, treat insurance stocks not as well as they normally would get treated. That will change. That will change at some point in the near future, and our company will get better recognition, which should reflect itself in our stock price. Our track record for success on the things we control has been very strong. It's strong not because of the directors only, not because of the senior managers only, but because of all of our staff, all of our employees, all of the people who make things happen day in and day out. I retired from my job running a bank a number of years ago, and after about six months, I was talking to a friend and I said, "You know, it's kind of interesting that I was never the smartest person.
I was probably not the hardest working person. I got up every day and came to work and did the job that was required of me, and I worked hard at it, and I did it in an honest way." I'm kind of impressed with my ability to do that day in and day out. You do it the same way. Some of you have children who get sick. Some of you have other events in your lives that make it hard to get up every day and come and do your job, but you do. We're very thankful that you do that because it's been very important to the company's success. As you know, the only thing constant is change, and we're having our changes too. Tom Watjen is retiring as the CEO of the company. We've always had a transition plan in place.
Tom was not getting any younger but was going to, at some point, want to retire from our company. Rick McKenney was brought in several years ago. Rick is the kind of person that we knew had the potential to be our next CEO, and he's fulfilled that potential with the hard work over the last few years. It's easy to say sometimes, and it's said often when people retire that Rick has big shoes to fill. Tom Watjen has been a strong supporter of our company, and if you're someone like me who likes Tom a lot, you give him a lot of credit for the turnaround of our company over the last several years, and he deserves all that credit. Yeah, Rick has big shoes to follow, but you as employees shouldn't worry about that.
We, as boards of directors, have looked hard and chosen well, I think, and I think Rick will fill Tom's shoes without any trouble at all. In fact, I kidded at a dinner last night, he may make those shoes even bigger as we go forward. We're very happy that Tom was part of our company for as long as he was. We're even happier that we have someone like Rick McKenney in a position to take over and run this company. That's what happens today. Tom, though, is so important to our company that we asked if he would serve as Chairman of the Board for two more years. Tom's agreed to do that, I'm losing my job at this company. As I look at the three of them, they're probably asking the right person to step away from that job.
Tom will be our Chairman for two years, working closely with Rick, and it will allow our company have that stability and continuity that every company should have as they go through a transition. Today marks a landmark day for Tom. He's the longest-serving CEO, not just in our industry, but in corporate America. Officially, as he retires and the reins go over to Rick, it's interesting to note this young man, who we all remember 10 or 12 years ago, is now a real pro, and a very experienced pro as we look at the change. I didn't follow the script on this one, I'm trying to catch up on my page here. If you just give me a second, I'll do that. Let me ask you one more question, and then I'll turn it over to Tom.
The question becomes, where will the company be in the future? I don't know, and you don't know. I think we can plan that if you continue to show up every day as you've done over the last several years, and work as hard as you've worked, as we work hard to transition the management of the company from a super CEO like Tom Watjen to a CEO with huge potential in Rick McKenney, this company is going to be in a very good position. I'd love to be out there in the audience 10 years down the road as the stock trades at an all-time high, and all of us are standing around talking about how lucky we are to be here. Wouldn't that be a great company meeting that we're going to have? I'm looking forward to that meeting.
When you have that meeting, I'll be in the audience sharing it with you. Let me now introduce Tom as we get into the presentation part of our meeting. Thank you.
Thank you, Bill. Well, thank you, Bill, and thank you for those wonderful remarks. Actually, I couldn't tell he wasn't reading the script, could you? I thought he was following it to the T. Again, let me add my welcome, as Bill said, we're off to a great start in 2015. I think a lot of us have an awful lot of confidence that the things that we've been able to do are repeatable into the future, and our best days are still ahead of us. Whether it's this past quarter or whether it's this past year or looking back even over a longer period of time, I think we all know there's probably four characteristics that define this company, Rick will talk about these more in just a moment.
It starts with the fact we're in business where we can make a difference in the lives of our customers. We truly make a difference at times when people need us most, need to support themselves and their families. It's nice to be in an honorable business where you can say that. Be in a business that really matters. We're also in a business where, frankly, if you're disciplined and focused, that not only leads to good things for your customers, it also leads to good things for your shareholders as well. I think we've shown the ability to consistently perform well in good environments and not so good environments. Again, it's nice to be in a business where you have those kind of characteristics to it. Let's face it, we're also, as Bill alluded to, we're also in a business where our people matter.
They make a significant difference in the things that we do each and every day for our customers. They actually create the culture and the values of this organization, one where we always put our customers first, one where we always do the right thing. It's good to be part of an organization where, frankly, values are important, culture is important. Our people really are our best asset. Last but not least, it's also nice to be in a business where there's a growing need for the things that we do. We all know that most consumers don't have the very basic protections they need to protect themselves and their families. That's the business we're in.
That actually provides the greatest opportunity we look forward to where we can continue to build and grow off a very nice platform and a nice set of successes that we've had in the past. To me, those four characteristics have been the ones we've talked about for a number of years. It's actually what I think drives each of us each and every day, not just to deliver value for our customers and our shareholders, but make a great environment from which our people enjoy working. With that, I'm going to turn things over to our president and very soon to be CEO, Rick McKenney. I think Rick will dive a little deeper into those four elements. Rick.
Good morning, everyone. It's good to have everybody here. I look out in our audience. I see our board members. I see many of our employees. There are going to be a lot of people on the webcast listening as well. We also have some of our employees that have recently retired here. Certainly worth recognizing that much of what we do here today, a lot of what I'll talk to you about was built by these people. This is a company that has been in existence over 160 years, and it's not what we do in any quarter, in any day. It's about what we do over a longer period of time. That's what I want to talk about, is where we are today, but most importantly, where are we going. If I start out, we have to start first with our customers.
This is all about our customers, what we do, the values that we have as a company, who we're there to serve is the most important thing we do. When you think about what we deliver every day, in an annual basis, we deliver $6.7 billion of benefits to people at a time that may be the time of greatest need in their lives. It's an important mission that we have today. It's important that we continue to fulfill that mission and do a great job for our customers. If you think those moments in time, 230,000 people actually return to work with the assistance of some of our best people that are focused not on the event, but are focused on the process that people need to go to get them back to work.
A critical thing that we provide here in the U.S. as well as in the U.K. Lastly, think about all the people that we touch, all the different places that we touch. About 25 million people across the world that we actually, at time of need, we are there, and we take that very seriously in terms of how we think about how we run the company, how we do the backdrop in terms of how we organize the company, and then what we think about what we're there to do, how we're to deliver, and what our overall mission is. We start there with our customers. Very important that we think about that. Now at the same time, in delivering great value to our customers, we've also been able to deliver good value to our shareholders.
It's one of consistency, and I think that's an important thing. It's one of discipline. We do that, you can actually be very good and customer centric, at the same time, returning very good returns to your shareholders. You'll see that over the last several years, going back to 2008, we've had earnings grow at 5.5% per year. In the last quarter, we actually generated $0.89, also growing about 5% on a year-over-year basis. The important thing to look at here is this was through a pretty tumultuous time in the global environment. You only get there through a period of discipline, making sure that you stay focused on that customer, and you don't lose sight of what we're here to do on a daily basis. The second piece is about our shareholders and building value.
If you look over the last eight years, going back to 2008, you'll see that we grew book value per share 8% per year on average. We're also continuing to grow the company, and growth is an important theme as we think about our future. It's difficult in a world where actually the world is shrinking, economies are contracting to grow. We've been very stable, and as we've said, we've grown in that environment. We look forward, as economies start to expand, as things get a little bit better in the employment picture, we want to see how we can continue to grow this company. I'll talk about our positioning in a few seconds in terms of what we're able to do there.
It's good to actually have good businesses that are growing, serving good customers, but our shareholders expect us to generate good returns as well. When you think about that over the last several years, we had some leading return on equity performing businesses in the insurance space. You take our Unum US business at 13.5%, leading type views in the group space of what we're able to deliver, a very high returning U.K. business at just over 16%, and Colonial Life has done an excellent job over the last several years, generating almost 17% returns as they continue to grow that franchise and ultimately protect more people. We also have our closed block, which is something to work with our customers.
These are our customers, very important that we continue to service them well and take care of them at their time of need, but it is generating lower returns. When you bring that all together, though, overall, our enterprise generates 11.5% return on equity. In our space, that is very good. We don't rest on that. We want to look at areas we can enhance our return on equity, areas we can continue to stabilize and make sure that we continue to generate the returns that our shareholders expect and the shareholders we've delivered for them over those last several years. One of the things that we've been able to do with that good, steady, strong discipline view is actually to return capital to shareholders. Because our businesses and how they're structured are very highly capital generative, we've been able to buy back our stock.
That's not the first thing we want to do with the capital we generate. We want to invest it back in our businesses. We want to look at how we can continue to grow the enterprise. When you're unable to do that in a world that is flat to contracting, we've been buying back our stock at very favorable rates. As we've been buying back stock at 60%, 70%, 80% of our book value, you've seen that over the last several years, we've retired almost one-third of the shares outstanding. Because of that stability, we've been able to do that, and returning capital through share buyback has been a very important role we play.
Not necessarily the first and foremost we want to do, but with our business model that we have today, we expect we'll continue to return capital through share repurchase in the coming years. At the smaller end, you can see in the bottom is continuing to raise our dividend. This morning, our board of directors voted to increase our dividends by 12%. It's on a series of many years you've seen in a row of us increasing dividends. If you go back to 2007, almost doubling the level of the dividends we pay out on a quarterly basis. We think it's important that as we generate those earnings, we're also returning that on a very consistent basis to our shareholders through dividends. When you take them in concert, going back to 2008, we've returned almost $3.8 billion to shareholders through share repurchase and dividends.
We think that's a shareholder-friendly way, but once again, representative of a very strong business model that takes good care of customers, make sure we do it in a disciplined way, then ultimately, we can generate these type of returns. If you take that overall, it's actually been accruing to our shareholders as well, and you can see that over the last 10 years, our total return to our shareholders has been just over 130%. We've also got the other indicators out there. If you happen to be invested in the S&P 500, about 109%. If you're in the life and health space, our real competitors, you'd be at about 80%. We're outperforming our peers over that long period of time.
It gets back to the theme of consistency, stability, and making sure that we are thinking about our shareholders and our customers simultaneously and making sure we're taking care of both. You don't do that, though, without a great workforce. When you think about it, we summarize that in saying we have a culture of responsibility. That responsibility is to those multiple constituents. It's making sure that we are responsible to our customers at that time of need, at a critical time in their lives, that we're responsible to our communities that we operate in, that we're responsible to our employees and making sure they have a great work environment.
You can see here some of the accolades we've gotten over time, but I think it's much deeper than that in terms of how we think about the overall enterprise, what we do, and how we think about how we want to run this company, and it is one that is a culture of responsibility. As we think of that going forward, the need is never greater for what we do. I'll give you a couple of metrics so you can understand why we think we're positioned incredibly well in the space that we're in today here in the U.S. and the U.K. and looking for expansion in other places. I don't need to remind you that 40% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and have no cover for that time of need of the unexpected that may happen to them.
That need is great that we be there to help take care of those people when the unexpected happens. You also take the metric, 70% lack disability insurance, 30% lack life insurance. These things happen to people. It's going to happen sometime in their lives. We need to make sure we have more people protected to take care of that situation. The next is 70% of employers actually feel like they have a responsibility for their employees. I can tell you as a company, as Unum, we feel that way. 70% of employers out there do feel that responsibility, and that's why we choose the worksite in terms of where we want to distribute our products.
It's an important place that we have that we think we get scale to reach many more consumers than you can on a one-on-one basis, and we think we have great positioning to do so. I'll share that with you in a second. Then in the lower right-hand corner, the reality is governments are going to provide less and less. The responsibility is going to shift to individuals. That is exactly where we play. As people think about their needs being covered, it's not going to be covered by the governments in the future, both here in the U.S. as well as in the U.K. It's going to be self-responsibility that's going to happen, and that's where we play with the private type selection that we have. A very exciting time.
We think we fall right in the middle of the demographics, which will be important as we look out over the next decade. One of the other things that's very important about that is we see the role of the employer as being the place where distribution happens. I mentioned 70% of the people care about taking good care of their employees. We don't choose to actually participate in the healthcare side of that. We don't choose to participate actually in the savings side of that. Where we like to play is actually in the employee benefits. The ancillary benefits come. It's about 10% of the pie, but when you think of the markets that we're in today, they're quite deep. We have a market of $35 billion that we actually are penetrating in every day and making sure.
We'd like to see that expand, and we're working hard to make sure that does expand, but that is actually where we play today. Focus, discipline, and making sure we're taking care of that space. I think it's important that over the years, we've actually been narrowing that focus so that our deep expertise comes through as we deal with customers on a daily basis. Also in the workplace, this distribution, if you think about it that way, is a powerful distribution channel. Most people wouldn't know that 78% of all life insurance is distributed at the workplace. Over 90% of all disability you buy at the workplace. That is actually consistent with what we see on the savings side. You can see the numbers that we talk about, 91% of the retirement protection obtained at the workplace, as well as 84% of healthcare.
The workplace is, here in the U.S. as well as the U.K., an important place where distribution plays, and that's where we're right in the middle of, it's where we're focused, and it's what we do extremely well. This also is leveraged off a strong position of good historical strength that we have across our businesses. We've been the number one disability provider for over 30 years. That's good in terms of talking about history. What that means is we have deep expertise in this company about what that means, taking care of people in that time of need that they have from that perspective.
We take that number one position, leverage a very strong life insurance position and a strong emerging voluntary benefits business, both in our Unum US business as well as in Colonial Life, which is more of a direct model that we have out there today. We think we are attacking the workplace as a point to distribute these protection needs very effectively. Also in the U.K., similarly, we have a number one position in group income protection, which is a disability product in the U.K., a very leading market share that we have there. This is what we do. This is where our knowledge base is. We take this history, these position of strength, and leverage that through the workplace. Ultimately, what does that mean? When we think about that, it's how we continue to grow this company. Those needs exist. The demographics are there.
Where we're going exists. Where we are positioned is very good. The profits of our product, the history of product's very strong. What we're starting to see is an expanding economy and the expanding of our products. Just a quick chart to show you here that we're on the edge of seeing some very good growth. If you look back over the last year, in the first quarter, we actually saw 5% premium growth, which as you see expanding economies, as you see payrolls starting to increase, which we haven't seen now for the last several years, you'll start to see that growth because of our positioning. We as a company, we as a management team, and we as a Board of Directors are extremely excited about the positioning that we have today. We think we have the business model to take us forward.
We have the employees, the cultural responsibility to take us forward, and we look forward to what the future brings and what the coming days bring. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Rick. I don't know if I could do it. Thank you, Rick, and I hope amongst other things, the things you took away from Rick was a sense of confidence in our future, and I think a clear vision as to what we want to be as a company going forward. I don't want you to mistake confidence for complacency. I think we recognize we've got to continue to adapt and change as a company, continue to respond to the changing environment, continue to change in response to the changing needs of our customers. I think I want to say very clearly the board and I have enormous confidence in Rick and the entire leadership team's ability to build from the base we have right now. Not just build from it, but build to even go beyond the things that we're doing right now.
Again, there's enormous confidence that we have an enormous potential out there, the right people in the right positions, and the right footprint in order to take advantage of that. Our better days are very much still ahead. One of the things I do want to do, though, is extend some thanks because we don't get to where we are today as an organization without a lot of people working in a very concerted way for a common set of goals, actually. I want to start with my chairman, Bill Ryan. Bill, you mentioned it in jest, but as Bill said, he's stepping aside and maybe he would suggest I bumped him out of the way actually to become chairman. It wasn't that at all, actually.
Bill's fortunately staying with us as a lead independent director, where we will continue to have the benefit of his leadership and his experience and background on the board. I just want to thank you very much for your leadership as chairman. I alluded to it, I also want to thank the board for their support and guidance. It's not easy to be a board member or for a board to act as an entity, thinking about the short term, the long term, thinking about strategy, thinking about financial issues. Also, as Bill mentioned in his comments, thinking about leadership development, succession planning, so we have the right people in the right positions, not just to perform today, but to be sure that we've got continuity and that we have the ability to build and grow and have that consistency in performance.
Again, I want to thank the board for the good work that they've done to position this company in the way that it's been positioned, not just again, to deliver on what we know today, but deliver on the things that we see out there in the future. Thank you very much to the board for your strong leadership. Really, most importantly, I want to thank my colleagues at the company here, past and present. Rick mentioned in his comments, we're very fortunate to have some of the leadership of this organization that were very instrumental in positioning our business, frankly, for the future, actually, and setting the stage for what we think is a very bright future as an organization, not just business-wise, but also making sure that there's solid leadership and consistent leadership going forward.
Again, I want to thank my colleagues that were fortunate enough. I was part of their team, and we were both teammates together as we built and grew this business, and it's very good to see them here. I also want to thank all of our employees because the results that Rick went through require a whole army of people working to a common cause, and it requires everyone contributing to that in a way that frankly is very exemplary. It's not just delivering the results, but it's how you deliver those results. It's the values and culture that you instill in an organization.
I think frankly, we couldn't be more pleased with the teammates we have in place, with the people we have in place to, again, not just deliver on the business as we know it today, but to continue to build off this very solid platform. I want to again thank all of our people at the company for just simply doing the right thing and representing our interests very well and in a way that we can all be very proud of. Thank you all in the company, and thank you. I will say it's because of your efforts, I think we have great confidence in the future.
It's not just made up because it's out there as a piece of potential, but we actually have that great confidence because it's the things we've seen you do in the past that we know we're going to continue to do in the future. Also want to thank our shareholders. Obviously, we understand we've got to continue to earn your respect and confidence each and every day. Hopefully, you feel this is a company and a management team and a board who does the right things to position ourselves, certainly for the short term, but also has the long-term interests of our shareholders in mind as we think about the actions every day. Again, thank you so much for your support. On a more personal note, on behalf of my family, I'm very fortunate to have my wife and one of my daughters here with me.
Just want to thank you for allowing me to be your CEO for the last 12 years. It's been a real honor and a privilege and something I'll never forget. On that'll conclude my final formal comments actually as the CEO. With that, I'm going to turn things back over to our Chairman, Bill Ryan. Bill?
Thank you, Tom. I was going to say, and I'll do it anyway, that if you look around the world, there's not very many successful executives who do it on their own. They need the support of their family. Nanette is here, and Tom's daughter is here. Thank you both for supporting Tom because you've made it happen the way it was great for the company. We really appreciate that. Rick's family's here, too. Pam's here. Pam, thank you for the support of Rick because it's made him a better executive. Kids, your dad's pretty cool right now. Keep that in mind. He's pretty cool right now. He really is. With that, the last part of our presentation is to talk about the question and answer session. Lisa, do you want to give us the ground rules on how people can ask questions?
Sure. Thank you, Bill. If you wish to ask a question, we have microphones set up in the aisles here for you to use. Please speak directly into the microphone because this meeting is being audiocast. We ask that you begin by stating your name and confirming that you are a shareholder. Out of respect for your fellow shareholders, comments and questions should be limited to matters that relate to this meeting. I'll now turn it back to the Chairman for your questions.
Great. I'll do that in a second, but I just want to kid with you one more time. These are former executives over here. If they ask a question, I'm not going to answer it. Just keep that in mind, former executives. That's what it is. Are there any questions from our shareholders today at our annual meeting, the 2015 annual meeting? Since there are no questions, our meeting is adjourned. Thank you very much for coming today, and we really do appreciate it. Thank you all very much.