If you were puzzled by the fact that the $73M compensation package paid to retail head Angela Ahrendts dwarfed those awarded to other senior Apple execs, including Tim Cook’s $9.2M, Apple explained that it was in large part to compensate her for unvested Burberry stock she lost by leaving the company …
Re/code reports that Ahrendts walked away from unvested Burberry stock worth $37M, in addition to salary and allowances totalling $5M a year to take a position paying substantially less. Apple said that her package reflected both her losses and her value to the company.
The Cupertino technology giant said its 2014 compensation package was designed to make Ahrendts whole financially — and successfully recruit an executive who, during her tenure at Burberry, led the company through a turnaround in which its market capitalization more than doubled.
Some 40% of her stock allocation is subject to performance requirements.
Business Insider noted that vacation cash-outs show that neither Tim Cook nor Eddy Cue used all their vacation days last year, picking up $57k and $42k respectively in compensation.
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No person should be worth that much.
I would expect her to Revolutionize the retail industry for 73M! wow lol
Of course she’s worth it. Read up on why:
http://magazine.wsj.com/features/the-big-interview/earning-her-strips/
I’m hoping we’ll see some of this: http://9to5mac.com/2013/10/22/why-tim-cook-appointed-angela-ahrendts-head-of-retail-in-one-4-minute-video/
You are worth whatever someone is willing to pay. you can’t really blame someone for taking the money, but rather for it being being offered in the first place. The only time I would get upset by some outrageous salary is in the public sector where the salary is taxpayer funded..
Hold on a second there. Do not confuse “Executive Team” with “Board” – they’re two very different things in every respect.
They overpaid. By a lot.
Apple Retail does not strike me as something that needs anyone to work magic on it. You can’t even get inside one of their stores. What is she gonna do? Make the lines EVEN longer?
For me, it depends what she can achieve. I generally find Apple Stores pretty horrible places to visit and avoid it as much as I can – though that is largely due to the crowds created by their popularity, so …
There was (is) a lot of turmoil in Apple’s retail stores when Ron Johnson left several years ago. Policies were changing almost daily, focus was constantly being shifted from one metric to another (customer satisfaction, AppleCare, wait time, etc), scheduling was constantly a nightmare, etc. You wouldn’t think that the top level of retail would have that much influence but in this case they did. I was a Genius at Apple for a couple years before Ron left and a couple years after he left, the difference in work environment was almost night and day. Knowing several people throughout Apple retail I was able to find that the changes weren’t localized to our store, but were happening everywhere.
I’ve long since left Apple but several of my old colleagues who still work there are thrilled to have Angela on board, with the hopes that she’ll bring retail back under control for the workers.
Angela Ahrendts = social climbing skills + feeding on the ideas of subordinates and presenting them as her own
I have seen this too many times, though it usually stays under the carpet. In honest life, there would be much less money involved and it would be distributed among the people who enhanced the brand.
To sum it up – she is worth 10x the average pay at Apple for being a decision maker, far from the ridiculous millions.
Gotta love when the executives’ unused vacation days are worth more than their retail employees annual pay.
Is it your beliefs that the average employee is worth the same pay as Cook, or that they are capable of running Apple. They are sales clerks, and as such are actually paid very well. If you think they are under compensated, have a chat with and sales clerk at other high-end retail stores about their pay. You will be shocked.
It’s the same the whole world over
It’s the poor what gets the blame
It’s the rich what gets the pleasure
Ain’t it all a bloomin’ shame?
Amazing. The people who actually do the work get paid scraps compared to this. The muppets simply bellow out commands to executives, who pass down to vp’s and seniors, to teams, to managers, and to engineers, designers, retail staff etc. Then the top 10% of the company takes the credit.
I used to work for Apple retail until very recently. We would work our asses off at the Genius Bar, being treated like garbage by customers, who would be defended by managers (“assume positive intent” was the key recycled phrase). Then when the end of quarter results came in we would celebrate at how much money we brought in, how may customers we served, NPS scores etc. High ranking managers would get stock and cash bonus’..
What did the 200+ retail staff get?
Free pizza and a tray of cookies to share.
The best marketing company/propaganda machine in the world who just happen to make software and hardware.
Yeah, that0s how it is.
You should have studied for your SAT’s.
“What did the 200+ retail staff get? – Free pizza and a tray of cookies to share.” How long have you been a laborer in capitalist America? Most of us only dream of free pizza.
As Apple gets further and further away from the Jobs era, it makes worse and more worse business decisions. This $73 million dollar waste and the purchase streaming also-ran Beats a just a few examples that Cook is really clueless as CEO.
Your nomination for CEO is — ?
Obviously himself.
Let Apple BOD (Board of Directors) hope that ‘past performance is a guide and even guarantee to future results’, although my broker always warns me that this in not the case with stocks.
Somewhere, Ron Johnson–who CREATED Apple’s Retail division–is appalled (I hope). This, as much as anything, reflects how mightily Apple has fallen. If this doesn’t show that “greed” is driving the Apple Exec team more than anything, I can’t possibly fathom what would (to find out that Tim Cook drains babies and drinks their blood to stay young and healthy so he doesn’t need his vacation days??).
And what needs to be understood is that Apple, completely tangential to the comments here about the pay of Apple Retail, does not compensate even their upper-tier engineering staff very well, relatively to the other players in The Valley. (Which ties into Jobs’ role in the paygate fiasco, pushing down pay since Apple was underpaying their employees while watching them get easily cherry-picked by start-ups and Google and Facebook.) All the “geniuses” that Steve Jobs and Tim Cook refer to at EVERY Keynote for having birthed and toiled on these “insane” products, Apple pays average or below average salaries; consistently anonymous Apple employee surveys show that workers “offset” the lesser pay with the “privilege” of working for Apple. So this isn’t an asshole move just to low-pay retail workers, this is an asshole move all the way up to the highly-skilled engineers WHO ACTUALLY MAKE APPLE. (When I worked at/directly with Apple, it was well known that the sales and marketing team members were better financially compensated than the engineering and support team members. At that time it was framed that the sales team had such an uphill battle against the IBM/DOS entrenchment that it was deserved in order to get the “insanely great” products into the hands of users. But either way, the slight to the actual technology-intelligent workers was the same.)
There is an element of envy mixed with revulsion in most responses to this, I am not sure seeing how much these execs get is really news fodder, but it is a bit of a shock, esp. after the retail channel has had issues with apple Store labour issues and trying to stop HO employees finding jobs at other companies.
The feeding from the trough was especially repulsive when the economy was worse, now it’s better maybe less so, but 73 million just in compensation for choosing to leave your old job. Really? They could change the name of apple corp to Disneyland with headlines like that.
No one is worth $73M period. An Apple retail employee would have to work over 2,500 years to make that kind of $. An Apple engineer, you know the people who really create the products we love and generates Apple’s massive profits, would need to work over 360 years. And why should Apple pay to “make her whole” on her Burberry stock options? It was her decision to leave. Is Apple so generous when an engineer leaves another tech firm to join Apple? Given the fact that Apple (along with Google) is paying $430M to settle a lawsuit where they were colluding to limit job opportunities, and thereby lower the wages of tech workers, I think not.
Yeah they *just* got sued for LOW WAGES. Why on earth would they want to pay somebody a lot, all of a sudden? idiot.
Well unvested mean she hadn’t earned it yet, but still it has to be accounted for when encouraging someone to leave a company – BUT $37 million to $73 million?
Angela Ahrendts past CEO of Burberry introduced 3-D technology first time in fashion and using social media and e-commerce increased online sale with 60% over the last year “….One of the important things we’ve accomplished is having Burberry speak to younger people, having it be relevant and modern, and the fact is that this is now the way people connect to brands, how loyalty is built.”
Now imagine this money was given to a startup with an incredible idea that nobody cares about because it doesn’t satisfy any investors hunger for being cool? Welcome to the technology bubble.