Maybe it’s just me.
So the Wall Street Journal is reporting that as a reward for his debatable stewardship of Nokia, CEO Stephen Elop is being paid approximately 25 million dollars.
Here’s what they had to say..
Chief Executive Stephen Elop is set to receive a compensation package estimated by the Finnish company to be about €18.8 million ($25.4 million), as a result of the $7.2 billion sale of Nokia’s devices business to Microsoft Corp. MSFT +0.96%
Mr. Elop will receive an equity compensation worth about €14.6 million, and an additional €4.2 million in salary and bonus, upon the closing of the sale of Nokia’s devices unit. The deal is expected in the first quarter of next year if it gets approval from Nokia shareholders.
So let me get this straight.
He took the company from being a dominant company all the way down to being acquired by Microsoft and for this he gets 25 million?
How can this be approved by Nokia shareholders? Are they absolutely insane?
To add insult to injury, the article continues..
Mr. Elop has been widely speculated to be a potential successor to Microsoft’s current CEO, Steve Ballmer. He took Nokia’s helm in September 2010 after a career with Microsoft, and will return as part of the handset deal.
What do you all think of this news? Maybe it’s just me?
Use the comments below…
All Comments
I agree that its some primo bullshit dude…
Yeah it does kinda stink but the dude must have worked hard…
this guy does not worth a cent. But he made a good job as a MS spy : he put down Nokia so MS can acquire the company for almost nothing and he comes back at home (MS) as a winner to be the prefered choice of his good and old friend ballmer to become the new CEO. I hope MS shareholders will not fall in this trap. Or we can say bye-bye to MS…
The whole thing seems pretty nutso to me dude…
He didn’t Nokia down. Nokia put themselves down. They are the IBM of the phone industry. They were the king of the hill in the old phone sector, but only made one memorable phone when to trend was moving from feature phones to smart phones. They were too busy resting on their feature phone dominance. They should have been Apple or at least Blackberry. Heck maybe if both they and Microsoft had come out with something like Windows Phone 3 or 4 years earlier, both would be in a much better position than they are now in the phone business.
Ray, I agree with you again. When I lived in England, everyone had a Nokia because at the time, they WERE the best. But like Blackberry, they didn’t move on when the iToys came out. Nokia was clever to steal him away from Microsoft. He saw the writing on the wall, stopped further development of their OS, got their financial house in shape all while brokering a deal to make phones for MS. Since HE got Nokia’s s*^t together, they were attractive enough for Microsoft to buy (a LOT more attractive than Blackberry). Why not reward a guy who has the knowledge and ability to do that? If he didn’t change the course of Nokia, they would have been still be making good phones on their unpopular OS. They would have been dead by now. So now, they are rewarded by making their good phones on an up and coming (an in many respects) better OS. Sounds like a win-win situation to me.
Don’t you think they should have maybe used Android on their phones? Might that not have turned out differently?
I think you should ask HTC that question. I think that right now there are 2 worlds, Apple and Samsung. The rest of the players are scrambling to fight over the scraps. Hopefully things change but right now it is pretty ugly in the mobile world.
Edited cause my grammar is atrocious.
Why are you so in favor of Andoid phones? Isn’t this a WINDOWs site? It sounds like your ‘eye’ is on Android, not Windows.
I must be doing something right – people usually accuse me of loving Apple.
LOL
LOL! Yes…usually ‘eye’ and ‘apple’ do sometimes go together. But I still think, just because you are first out of the gates, doesn’t mean you finish first. 3 years ago, who would have thought Blackberry to be in the situation it is now. I also one has to think Globally. The US is just ONE market.
@Ammalgam:disqus, Nokia using Android would’ve worked as well for them as all the other “non-Samsung” Android phones, don’t you think?
It’s a good point but I guess my question is didn’t he have an obligation to the shareholders to SERIOUSLY explore that path?
And who says they didn’t? It has come out lately that they were certainly looking at it and were working on some proto-types. But looking at who has what market shares and by more established vendors within the Android universe, I could see why they didn’t go full-bore with it. Just saying’…
Of course don’t get me wrong. I’m still not saying he should get 25M, but Nokia’s decline is not his fault.
of course Nokia was not perfect, but Elop took it down, just because of MS interest (and it’s own interests !). Every clever person you can meet, event at nokia, will say you that Nokia should have been surfing the Android wave and not be stuck on Windows Phones. But it was not the will of MS, so not the will of Elop. I say this a crime against this maker. I’m pretty sure, like many others, even me should have bought a Android Nokia phone. THat’s the point. Elop was the cat among the pigeons…
If he became MS CEO, whom will he sell MS to?
Please everyone that didn’t get a $25,000,000 bonus take a cheap shot at someone that did. If you’re really good, it might be your superiority that will be similarly rewarded.