Netflix, Inc. stock prices recently surged, only to plunge once again. If the Los Gatos, Calif. video subscription company can’t stage a consistent comeback after months of travail, shareholders will find it challenging to make its senior managers accountable. Netflix shares soared nearly 10.5% to close at $73.52 per share on October 8, but have sunk since to [...]
Tag Archives | Stock options
GMI Ratings Governance Update | Netflix, Inc.
October 11, 2012 in Corporate Governance, Daily Viewpoint, Flash Reports
May 30, 2012: Forbes
May 30, 2012 in GMI In the News
May 30, 2012: Was Sanjay Jha’s Pay a Good Return on Investment? (Forbes)
Was Sanjay Jha’s Pay a Good Return on Investment?
May 30, 2012 in CEO Pay, Daily Viewpoint, News and Opinions
By Paul Hodgson – CCO and Senior Research Associate [This post first appeared on Forbes.com] The news that Sanjay Jha is stepping down after successfully negotiating the sale of his company Motorola Mobility Holdings to Google confirms the fact – once again – that compensation committees do not understand the terms “long-term” and “incentive”. Included [...]
May 18, 2012: Forbes
May 18, 2012 in GMI In the News
May 18, 2012: Facebook’s Zuckerberg: Never Mind the Shares, What About the Options (Forbes)
Facebook’s Zuckerberg: Never Mind the Shares, What About the Options
May 18, 2012 in CEO Pay, Daily Viewpoint, News and Opinions, Recent Events
By Paul Hodgson – CCO and Senior Research Associate [This blog first appeared on Forbes.com] The compensation committee report in Facebook’s proxy statement is pretty standard for an internet IPO. Cash compensation at the lower quartile of its peer group, total compensation, including equity, at the 99th percentile…. Mark Zuckerberg earned about a million dollars [...]
Executive pay and the sleeping time-bomb of stock option grants
May 2, 2012 in CEO Pay, Daily Viewpoint
By Paul Hodgson – CCO and Senior Research Associate This editorial first appeared on the Guardian's Comment is For Free website. CEO remuneration is sharply up again, in 2011. More worrisome for shareholders are the profligate stock options held by CEOs 2011 saw the second year of double-digit pay rises, according to GMI Ratings' preliminary [...]
Governance Issue: Netflix, Inc.
April 25, 2012 in Flash Reports
GMI Ratings Governnance Issue: Netflix, Inc. Region: North America Sector: Non-Cyclical Consumer Goods / Services Industry: Personal Services Market Cap: $ 5,773.0mm (Large Cap) ESG Rating: D AGR: Very Aggressive (2) Reed Hastings, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Netflix, is an example of a powerful executive whose ability to dominate a board [...]
Son of Mega Grant
February 27, 2012 in CEO Pay, Daily Viewpoint
By Paul Hodgson – CCO and Senior Research Associate This blog first appeared on Forbes.com today. Back in 2009 I noticed a trend among companies towards awarding really large numbers of stock options and I wrote a report on it for GMI Ratings called Return of the Mega Grant. For most of the decade, the [...]
Two Thumbs Down for Netflix’s Governance
February 3, 2012 in Corporate Governance
By Paul Hodgson – CCO and Senior Research Associate Full disclosure first, I’m a subscriber. Just don’t tell my struggling local, independent DVD rental store. Initial reservations aside, the news that on January 13, this year, a lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, alleging that Netflix, Inc. and certain of [...]
On the seventh day of Enron my comp committee gave to me: 7 million options granted each year since 2007
January 3, 2012 in CEO Pay
By Scott Patterson – Compensation Analyst Manager The founder of Oracle Corporation is a well-known CEO whose success has been well rewarded over the years. Lawrence Ellison had quite a run from fiscal 2007 through fiscal 2009 when he topped the $100 million mark in total realized compensation each year with a whopping $556.9 million [...]
An End to Tax Breaks for Stock Options?
July 17, 2011 in CEO Pay
By Paul Hodgson – Chief Communications Officer In a press release on Friday Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, announced that they had introduced legislation to end tax breaks for stock options. Since they are considered performance-related pay, stock option expense is subject to corporate tax relief under Section 162(m) of the [...]
Stock Compensation Bad, Cash Compensation Good
May 11, 2011 in CEO Pay
It’s not that simple, but the message is pretty clear from the author of new book, Fixing the Game: Bubbles, Crashes, and What Capitalism Can Learn from the NFL. Written by Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Business at the University of Toronto, the book puts our current financial woes firmly at the [...]
Small Print
February 25, 2011 in Small Print
A Small Print Valentine Barrie White, he da man! What a great set of criteria, as Mark Magee, Events Analyst Team Manager, says. Also, he adds, Virginia’s state slogan has been “Virginia is for lovers” for many years… I guess this proves it. This is from a February 8th press release on Amazon’s website. [...]
Ratings haiku VI
January 17, 2011 in Executive Pay
What price an option? Even in consistency, Inconsistency.
Executive Compensation at Savient Pharmaceuticals
August 16, 2010 in Executive Pay
The Corporate Library's concerns about executive compensation at Savient Pharmaceuticals have decreased. We note that the company issued performance-based stock options to three named executive officers for the first time in fiscal 2009. The options would fully vest if any one of the following conditions occurred before December 31, 2009: receipt of a “complete response [...]
Top Ten Largest Stock Option Grants of 2009
July 15, 2010 in CEO Pay
Earlier this week, The Corporate Library released “Starbucks’ Options Mega-Grant – Paying A CEO Millions Simply For A Market Rebound?” which served as an example of the type of analysis conducted for The Corporate Library's more expansive survey on the topic of large stock option grants. Picking up on our previous mega-grant research, we released this morning, “The Corporate Library's [...]
Starbucks: Megabucks via Mega-Grant
July 13, 2010 in CEO Pay
Each year since 2003 the compensation committee at Starbucks has granted stock options to CEO Howard Schultz during the same week in November. This trend continued in 2008 despite the fact that the stock was trading at a 5-year low of $8.64 that week. The problem you ask? The company calculates the number of options [...]
How many stock options did Liberty Media give its CEO?
June 28, 2010 in CEO Pay
Ten million, eight hundred and fifty-six thousand, to be precise. 10,856,000 stock options for CEO Gregory Maffei valued at just shy of $80 million. Unbelievable. Our ratings team, Hoang Nguyen and Damion Rallis, brought it to my attention to see if we needed to manually adjust Liberty Media's governance risk rating. Actually, it was almost [...]
Small Print
May 14, 2010 in Small Print
Better than nothing, but…. Events Analyst Dovid Muyderman spotted the following performance-based stock option awards to executives at comScore, announced in a May 6th 8-K. These significant grants were designed to motivate management to drive enterprise value toward a significantly higher market capitalization over the next two years. In addition, the 30-day price average [...]
Executive Compensation Concerns at Eastman Kodak Corporation
May 11, 2010 in Daily Viewpoint
The Corporate Library has increased concerns related to executive compensation policies at Eastman Kodak Corporation. As an example, CEO Antonio M. Perez’s change in pension value and deferred compensation earnings in 2009 was nearly $2.5 million, more than double his base salary and more than the combined 2009 base salaries of the five other Eastman [...]