Apple Inc chief executive officer Tim Cook received compensation valued at US$4.25 million this year, a 1.9 percent increase over last year, even as the iPhone maker’s stock gains lagged the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index.
The package includes a salary of US$1.4 million and US$2.8 million in non-equity incentive plan compensation for the fiscal year that ended in September, the Cupertino, California-based company said in a filing on Friday with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
Cook, 53, is contending with thinning profit margins and slowing sales growth as rival gadget makers such as Samsung Electronics Co and Amazon.com Inc take on Apple with lower-priced devices.
After outperforming the S&P 500 for four straight years, Apple shares have gained 5.3 percent this year, compared with the index’s 29 percent advance.
Apple tapped Cook, a 15-year company veteran, to run the business prior to the death of his predecessor, Steve Jobs, in 2011. Cook received compensation that year of US$378 million, one of the biggest pay packages on record, boosted by US$376.2 million in stock awards that he’ll get over a decade.
Cook this year forfeited more than 7,000 restricted stock units because of the company’s stock performance from August last year to August this year, according to the filing. The modification was part of his 2011 agreement.
Cook’s top deputies — Peter Oppenheimer, Eddy Cue and Jeff Williams — all received much smaller pay packages this year than last year, because last year they were granted restricted stock units, which are given to officers other than the CEO every two years.
Oppenheimer, Apple’s chief financial officer, was this year awarded compensation valued at US$2.63 million, including a salary of US$866,061 and incentive compensation of US$1.75 million. A year ago, he received US$68.6 million, with stock awards valued at US$66.2 million.
Cue, the senior vice president in charge of iTunes, made US$2.65 million this year, down from US$50.4 million a year earlier, and Williams, the senior vice president who manages Apple’s supply chain, received US$2.63 million, down from US$68.7 million.
In October, Apple forecast gross margins for the current quarter that missed analysts’ projections and predicted that the percentage sales increase in the period will be in the single digits.
Apple said that the company exceeded the maximum performance goals for sales and operating income set by the compensation committee, resulting in each officer receiving 200 percent of base salary under the bonus plan.
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
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