Financial Information
Other Risks
Changes in laws and regulations could reduce our profits or increase our costs. Our businesses are subject to a wide variety of laws, regulations, and policies in jurisdictions around the world, including those for financial reporting, taxes, healthcare, and the environment. Changes to these laws, regulations, and policies, including those associated with health care, tax or financial reforms, could reduce our profits. Further, we anticipate that many of the jurisdictions in which we do business will continue to review tax and other revenue raising laws, regulations, and policies, and any resulting changes could impose new restrictions, costs, or prohibitions on our current practices and reduce our profits. In particular, governments may revise tax laws, regulations, or official interpretations in ways that could have a significant impact on us, including modifications that could reduce the profits that we can effectively realize from our non-U.S. operations, or that could require costly changes to those operations, or the way in which they are structured. For example, most U.S. company effective tax rates reflect the fact that income earned and reinvested outside the United States is generally taxed at local rates, which are often much lower than U.S. tax rates. If changes in tax laws, regulations, or interpretations significantly increase the tax rates on non-U.S. income, our effective tax rate could increase and our profits could be reduced. If such increases resulted from our status as a U.S. company, those changes could place us at a disadvantage to our non-U.S. competitors if those competitors remain subject to lower local tax rates.
If we cannot attract and retain talented associates, our business could suffer. We compete with other companies both within and outside of our industry for talented personnel. If we cannot recruit, train, develop, and retain sufficient numbers of talented associates, we could experience increased associate turnover, decreased guest satisfaction, low morale, inefficiency, or internal control failures. Insufficient numbers of talented associates could also limit our ability to grow and expand our businesses. Any shortage of skilled labor could also require higher wages that would increase our labor costs, which could reduce our profits of our third-party owners.
Delaware law and our governing corporate documents contain, and our Board of Directors could implement, anti-takeover provisions that could deter takeover attempts. Under the Delaware business combination statute, a stockholder holding 15 percent or more of our outstanding voting stock could not acquire us without Board of Director consent for at least three years after the date the stockholder first held 15 percent or more of the voting stock. Our governing corporate documents also, among other things, require supermajority votes for mergers and similar transactions. In addition, our Board of Directors could, without stockholder approval, implement other anti-takeover defenses, such as a stockholder’s rights plan.