Goldman Sachs Group Inc awarded chief executive officer Lloyd Blankfein a US$5 million cash bonus to be paid out in three years if he meets certain targets, on top of US$21 million in compensation last year.
The long-term incentive was US$3 million last year and US$7 million in 2011 when the program began, the New York-based bank said on Friday in a filing. The awards can shrink or grow depending on whether the firm achieves a 10 percent average return on equity and 7 percent average increase in book value per share.
Wall Street firms including Goldman Sachs, which already gives a portion of top executives’ pay in restricted stock, have been seeking ways to encourage managers to focus on long-term performance. Goldman Sachs’s plan gives the board’s compensation committee, led by former Fannie Mae CEO James Johnson, the power to change the awards to so-called named executive officers, or NEOs.
“Our compensation committee may also, in its sole discretion based on its assessment of an individual NEO’s performance, adjust the amounts that may be paid under this award,” according to the filing, which says the committee can give between 0 percent and 150 percent of the amount due.
The firm also granted company president Gary Cohn a US$5 million long-term award this year. Vice chairmen J. Michael Evans and John Weinberg got US$4 million incentives. Last year, all of the firm’s executives named in the proxy received US$3 million in long-term incentives, down from US$7 million for all of the executives in 2011.
While the Goldman Sachs awards are initially tied to three-year periods, the board can opt to extend the measurement for another five years. In December last year, the compensation committee set the performance period for the 2011 incentive pay to end in December 2018 instead of December this year.
WASHINGTON’S INCENTIVES: The CHIPS Act set aside US$39 billion in direct grants to persuade the world’s top semiconductor companies to make chips on US soil The US plans to award more than US$6 billion to Samsung Electronics Co, helping the chipmaker expand beyond a project in Texas it has already announced, people familiar with the matter said. The money from the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act would be one of several major awards that the US Department of Commerce is expected to announce in the coming weeks, including a grant of more than US$5 billion to Samsung’s rival, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), people familiar with the plans said. The people spoke on condition of anonymity in advance of the official announcements. The federal funding for
HIGH DEMAND: The firm has strong capabilities of providing key components including liquid cooling technology needed for AI servers, chairman Young Liu said Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday revised its revenue outlook for this year to “significant” growth from a “neutral” view forecast five months ago, due to strong demand for artificial intelligence (AI) servers from cloud service providers. Hon Hai, a major assembler of iPhones that is also known as Foxconn, expects AI server revenues to soar more than 40 percent annually this year, chairman Young Liu (劉揚偉) told investors. The robust growth would uplift revenue contribution from AI servers to 40 percent of the company’s overall server revenue this year, from 30 percent last year, Liu said. In the three-year period
LONG HAUL: Largan Energy Materials’ TNO-based lithium-ion batteries are expected to charge in five minutes and last about 20 years, far surpassing conventional technology Largan Precision Co (大立光) has formed a joint venture with the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI, 工研院) to produce fast-charging, long-life lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, mobile electronics and electric storage units, the camera lens supplier for Apple Inc’s iPhones said yesterday. Largan Energy Materials Co (萬溢能源材料), established in January, is developing high-energy, fast-charging, long-life lithium-ion batteries using titanium niobium oxide (TNO) anodes, it said. TNO-based batteries can be fully charged in five minutes and have a lifespan of 20 years, a major advantage over the two to four hours of charging time needed for conventional graphite-anode-based batteries, Largan said in a
Taiwan is one of the first countries to benefit from the artificial intelligence (AI) boom, but because that is largely down to a single company it also represents a risk, former Google Taiwan managing director Chien Lee-feng (簡立峰) said at an AI forum in Taipei yesterday. Speaking at the forum on how generative AI can generate possibilities for all walks of life, Chien said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) — currently among the world’s 10 most-valuable companies due to continued optimism about AI — ensures Taiwan is one of the economies to benefit most from AI. “This is because AI is