Nokia chairman Risto Siilasmaa admitted on Tuesday that he had misled the public and Finland’s prime minister
over an 18.8 million euros (US$27.32 million) payoff to former chief executive Stephen Elop triggered by the sale of the mobile phone business to Microsoft.
Siilasmaa had tried to calm growing national anger at the massive payoff by saying that the terms were “substantially similar to those of former Nokia CEOs.”
However, on Tuesday he was forced to admit that the Canadian will pocket 14.6 million euros more than the previous Nokia boss, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, collected when he was fired three years ago.
Siilasmaa told Finnish news site Helsingin Sanomat that an “accident” during the formulation of the contract meant that Elop would collect the huge sum.
“This is a very unfortunate thing about the case, which, moreover, raises a lot of emotions,” Siilasmaa said, according to a translation of the Helsingin Sanomat article.
Nokia declined to comment further on Tuesday night.
Filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission reveal that Elop’s contract requires him to be paid 14.6 million euros in share awards on top of 18 months’ salary. Kallasvuo collected only 100,000 shares on top of 18 months’ pay.
Siilasmaa’s admission is likely to reignite the heated national debate over Elop’s payoff, which was triggered by Microsoft’s 5.5 billion euros takeover.
‘OUTRAGEOUS’
Finnish Prime Minister Jyrki Katainen criticized the payoff on national TV on Saturday as “outrageous.”
“Many, with reason, are sure to be thinking about what is reasonable,” he said. “Apparently the practices of rewards by large corporations are so exceptional that they cannot be understood with common sense.”
Finnish Finance Minister Jutta Urpilainen said the payoff could spark unrest.
“In addition to the general toxic atmosphere, it may be a threat to social harmony,” she wrote on her blog.
The payout was triggered by a change of control clause in Elop’s contract. As part of the deal with Microsoft, Elop stood down as Nokia’s CEO to run the phone unit within Microsoft, his employer before he joined Nokia three years ago.
The payout works out at roughly 1 million euros for every 1 billion euros wiped off Nokia’s market value under Elop’s leadership. Microsoft is paying 70 percent of the payoff, which works out at roughly the same as the controversial share bonuses.
Nokia paid Elop a US$6 million signing bonus when he joined the company in 2010 on top of his US$1.4 million salary.
‘BURNING PLATFORM’
Elop warned staff after taking the top job that Nokia was standing on a “burning platform” surrounded by innovative competitors that were taking its market share. He quickly decided that the company should abandon its own operating software for smartphones and tie up with Microsoft instead.
Elop is widely seen as the frontrunner to replace Steve Ballmer as chief executive of Microsoft.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts