Yahoo Inc. YHOO +0.16%showed just how big
it is betting that new Chief Executive Marissa Mayer can change its fortunes.
Ms. Mayer will receive up to $100 million
in compensation, stock, bonus and retention awards over the next five years,
according to a Thursday regulatory filing by the Sunnyvale, Calif., Internet
company.
Ms. Mayer is expected to receive around
$5.4 million from Yahoo for the remainder of this year and around $20 million a
year after that, though some of that amount is tied to performance targets set
by the board.
While it is hard to make a direct
comparison, Ms. Mayer's predecessors, Scott Thompson and Carol Bartz, received
compensation packages worth $27 million and $44.6 million, respectively, over
several years. Both CEOs departed prematurely. Mr. Thompson resigned in May
after a five-month stint, while Ms. Bartz was fired last fall after more than
2½ years at Yahoo.
Ms. Mayer, 37 years old, joined Yahoo as
CEO on Tuesday after a 13-year career at rival Google Inc., GOOG +2.12%where
most recently she was a vice president of local, maps and location services.
The Yahoo pay package includes restricted
stock units valued at $14 million in order to "partially compensate"
Ms. Mayer for forfeiting her compensation from Google. It also includes a
one-time retention award that is valued at $15 million and will vest over five
years.
Ms. Mayer wasn't one of Google's top
officers and so her compensation wasn't publicly disclosed, but she was
employee No. 20 at the Internet search firm and received a windfall in the
company's 2004 initial public offering.
Mark Reilly, a partner at 3C Compensation
Consulting Consortium LLC in Chicago, said that Ms. Mayer's compensation
package seemed "reasonable and competitive" given that Yahoo is
"a huge company, a turnaround situation, and they got someone who was
doing a fantastic job" at Google. Such a package is "needed to
attract that type of talent," he said.
Ms. Mayer faces the challenge of turning
around onetime Internet pioneer Yahoo, which has more than 700 million monthly
unique visitors to its news, sports, entertainment and email sites but has
failed to develop innovative Web services and is far behind its competitors in
offering sophisticated tools for advertisers to buy ads on its sites.
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