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Yahoo trims CEO’s salary to $1 a year, offers bonus of up to 9 million options
By Connie Guglielmo
Bloomberg News
Yahoo! Inc., the most-visited U.S. Internet site, cut the salary of Chief Executive Terry Semel to $1 a year, matching Google Inc.'s CEO pay, and approved a bonus and retention plan with options for 9 million shares.
Semel, 63, will earn $1 a year in salary through 2008 and be eligible for an annual bonus of as many as 1 million options, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company said yesterday in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The change brings Semel's salary in line with his peers at rival Google. In March, Google, the world's most visited search engine, said CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page will each be paid a $1 salary. Yahoo also gave Semel, who earned $600,000 in salary last year, options on 6 million shares at $31.59 each as a retention incentive.
Shares of Yahoo fell 47 cents to $31.52 in Nasdaq Stock Market composite trading and have dropped 20 percent this year.
Yahoo also announced salary and bonus plans for Chief Operating Officer Daniel Rosensweig, Chief Financial Officer Susan Decker, Chief Technical Officer Farzad Nazem and General Counsel Michael Callahan.
Rosensweig and Decker will each continue to earn $500,000 in annual salary and be eligible for cash bonuses of as much as $1 million a year through 2009, Yahoo said in the filing. The executives were given options to buy 2.1 million shares each over four years and restricted stock awards of 50,000 shares each.
Nazem's salary rises to $500,000 from $450,000 in 2005, and he is eligible for a cash bonus of as much as $1 million in 2006 and 2007, the company said. He also got options to buy 900,000 shares over two years and received a 50,000-share stock award. Nazem, chief technical officer since January 1998, received an $800,000 bonus last year.
Callahan received options to purchase 330,000 shares and was granted a restricted stock award of 73,000 shares.