Shareholders at today's Extraordinary General Meeting in Melbourne this morning opted to keep Harry Boon rather than pass the resolution to remove the chairman and appoint Price to the board.
The vote went down to the wire, with Boon securing 51.4% of the votes 432 million votes.
Boon had refused to speculate on his chances, but Price had told ProPrint on Wednesday that he was "quietly confident" of victory.
Price told ProPrint today: "We gave it good go but the shareholders have spoken. Now I will sit back and hope the board will achieve everything they say they will achieve. As a shareholder I want to see the return."
He ruled out putting in another challenge, "as long as the company doesn’t try anything stupid like selling the company to private equity for 9c, which is what triggered this initially".
The Stream Solutions founder announced his attempted coup on 3 February. The issue was referred to today's ballot after Boon refused to resign.
While the Paperlinx board backed Boon, the market seemed to favour Price, as the share price soared by 28% after news broke of his coup.
Paperlinx shares were valued at $2.58 when Boon joined the board in May 2008. They had plummeted to 11.5 cents by the time he became chairman last September. The share price was 12 cents at the end of yesterday. Trading was then halted until Tuesday.
Boon offered Price a seat on the board, but when the offer was rejected on Monday afternoon, Paperlinx responded with a public attack.
The board accused Price of being a "substantial risk" to the company's recovery plan.
The board said Boon deserved to remain chairman as he had "led significant and rapid change during a period of difficult trading conditions".
It also said he had "the required international and turnaround experience" and that his restructuring plan would save the company $61 million per year and return it to profitability.
Paperlinx reported a $61 million loss in last month's half-yearly report.
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I’d love to know how many proxies (non voters) it took to keep this Boon in. Certainly not a convincing win. Paperlinx doesn’t answer questions, is great at wasting money and happy to take our money for free while they live in luxury at our expense. I’m obviously terribly saddened by this missed opportunity to give this vibrant substantial shareholder Price a go, and I imagine the establishment were very worried he would win and did everything to avoid Price winning. The market has spoken who it wants, so all I can surmise is that the establishment is a tight closed shop and we can expect more erosion of equity and 0 interest on funds lent to Paperlinx into perpetuity
It seems scare campaigns still work better than anything else given Boon survives on calling Andrew Price a risk. I cannot imagine how a paper icon can be a risk to this 4 + $billion turnover company. I can imagine the panic mood among the incompetent sitting board and management. As for crikey.com your 2% of proxies going to Boon made the difference