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Apple's execs are not the best-paid
A report earlier this week from Businessweek claimed Apple has four of the five highest-paid employees among Standard & Poor's 500 companies. The figures cited in this report included both base salary and vested stock packages, which has some people, like Philip Elmer-DeWitt of Apple 2.0, crying foul. DeWitt open his acrid retort to the Businessweek article by asking whether "Bloomberg's brainiacs know the difference between an RSU and a pay check?" DeWitt points out that the compensation packages for Apple's top brass may have increased, but their pay has remained steady. These compensation packages include restricted stock units (RSU) that are not immediately available for the Apple executives and should not be counted as part of their pay. These RSUs are part of a retention package that becomes available after an employee works a set number of years. If the employee leaves before the RSUs have vested, then he or she loses that money. It's a common method used by companies to entice their employees to stay put for a while.
Apple employs four of America's top five paid executives
During a 1998 profile in Fortune, Steve Jobs stressed how true innovation requires hiring the right people. Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led and how much you get it. Of course, attracting, hiring and keeping the right people in the ultra-competitive world of Silicon Valley is no easy task. To that end, having a bank account that lingers in the US$137 billion range certainly helps. That said, it may not be all that surprising that four of the top five highest paid executives in the US are Apple employees. BloombergBusinessweek reports that Apple executives Bob Mansfield, Bruce Sewell, Jeffrey Williams, and Peter Oppenheimer received more compensation than nearly every other executive in America. Note, though, that the bulk of this compensation isn't in the form of cash, but rather in stock. Leading the salary charge at Apple is Mansfield, who currently serves as the company's senior VP of Technologies. Mansfield in 2012 received $85.5 million worth of stock options on top of a base salary of $805,400. Sewell, Apple's VP of Legal and Government Affairs, received a compensation package of $69 million in 2012, slightly ahead of Williams who received a compensation package of $68.7 million. Williams is currently Apple's senior VP of Operations, having taken on many of the responsibilities that Tim Cook previously took care of as Apple's former COO. And picking up the rear is Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer who received a compensation package of $68.6 million last year. The only executive in the US that made more than the aforementioned Apple executives was Oracle's Larry Ellison who earned $96.2 million last year.
Two Apple officials cash in some stock
Just in time to purchase a new yacht or luxury home for the holidays, a pair of Apple officials just sold some of their company stock in exchange for cold, hard cash. According to SEC filings released by the company, Apple general counsel Bruce Sewell sold 2,438 shares of AAPL at about US$549 and another 2,700 shares for about $550 per share. The sale of shares last Thursday netted Sewell about $2.8 million. Sewell had also sold 5,137 shares of AAPL stock on November 1, pulling in more than $3 million. Apple Chairman of the Board Arthur Levinson also sold shares last Thursday. He let go of 7,500 shares valued at $560.65 for a payday of $4.2 million. Why are they selling some of their shares? Who knows. It could be to avoid paying taxes at an expected higher rate in 2013, or they might just need the cash to buy some holiday gifts.
A look at Apple's "all-star" executives
Tim Cook, Phil Schiller, Jony Ive, and Steve Jobs are big names at Apple. These top executives are known around the technology industry and around the world for their operational excellence, marketing know-how, design genius and powerful reality distortion fields. While these four men often get credit for much of Apple's success, the company boasts an enviable collection of talented "chiefs" and senior vice presidents who help carve its skyward path. A new gallery from CNN Money takes a brief look at eleven of Apple's all-stars. For avid fans of Apple, some of the names mentioned in CNN Money's gallery may be familiar. But if you don't recognize names like Craig Federighi, Scott Forstall, Bob Mansfield, Ron Johnson, Peter Oppenheimer, Bruce Sewell, Jeff Williams, Eddy Cue, Katie Cotton, Dr. Guy "Bud" Tribble, or Greg Joswiak, this may be a good opportunity to brush up on the men and women who help shape one of the world's most successful companies.
Apple countersues Nokia for infringing 13 patents
So much for making nice. Apple just announced that it's countersuing Nokia for infringing thirteen of its patents -- slightly upping Nokia's claim that Apple's infringing ten. We haven't seen the case yet, but we'll post it up for you as soon as we find it -- and as we predicted in our breakdown of Nokia's complaint, this is shaping up to be a long and costly nightmare of a suit. Hey, do you think Apple general counsel Bruce Sewell might have a crazy lightning rod of a statement about the case for us? "Other companies must compete with us by inventing their own technologies, not just by stealing ours," said Bruce Sewell, Apple's General Counsel and senior vice president. Cool, thanks. We'll be in the corner under a Nomex blanket for the next few months. Update: Here's the PDF of the reply -- we're still reading all 79 pages of it, but it's what we expected: Apple says Nokia's patents aren't actually essential to GSM / UMTS, denies infringing them, and says they're invalid and / or unenforceable anyway. Apple also says Nokia wanted unreasonable license terms for the patents, including a cross-license for Apple's various iPhone device patents as part of any deal, which Apple clearly wasn't willing to do. That's in stark contrast to what Nokia says it wants in its lawsuit -- all it's asked the court for is past due license fees on its patents. (Which is odd, if you think about it: Nokia wouldn't come to terms on a license that didn't include iPhone patents, but it'll spend the cash on litigation for past due fees? That seems silly.) Oh, and if you're just in this for the bitchy quotes, here you go: As Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia's executive Vice President and General Manager of Multimedia, stated at Nokia's GoPlay event in 2007 when asked about the similarities of Nokia's new offerings to the already released iPhone:"[i]f there is something good in the world, we copy with pride." True to this quote, Nokia has demonstrated its willingness to copy Apple's iPhone ideas as well as Apple's basic computing technologies, all while demanding Apple pay for access to Nokia's purported standards essential patent. We'll let you know if we see anything else of interest, but we'd say we're in for a long, bumpy ride here.
