Sprint Looks Past Huge iPhone Investment, Increases CEO Pay
Despite Sprint‘s recent $15.5 billion commitment with Apple to sell the iPhone, CEO Dan Hesse’s compensation rose significantly.
Hesse’s pay rose 31 percent to $11.9 million, which included a $1.5 million increase in stock options and a $829,322 bonus, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal. This pay increase came after a tumultuous year for Sprint, in which the company lost a significant amount of contract customers.
While AT&T and Verizon Wireless increased the number of customer subscriptions, Sprint’s customer numbers fell by 98,000. Part of AT&T and Verizon Wireless’ boost in customer subscriptions is due to their expansion of 4G LTE networks, the report said.
"The Compensation Committee believed that our launch of the iPhone was an extraordinary circumstance" and therefore was not taken into account for executives’ short-term incentives, Sprint said of its board in the filing, according to the report.
Sprint is, however, improving in areas other than lucrative customer subscriptions.
The company increased its number of pay-as-you-go customers by 2.5 million, which means it netted 5.1 million new contract users last year, more than both Verizon Wireless with 4.3 million new contract customers and AT&T with 1.4 million new contract customers, the Wall Street Journal said.
Verizon tripled CEO Lowell McAdam’s compensation to $23.1 million. AT&T, on the other hand, decreased CEO Randal Stephenson’s compensation by more than $2 million.
