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Tim Cook, CEO of Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL), has received 5.04 million Apple shares this week, selling most of the stock for over US$751 million, the filings by the company showed.
The tranche of 5 million shares is the last leg of the compensation package that Mr Cook received when he took over as CEO of the iconic iPhone-maker, 10 years ago. Earlier last year, he got a revised compensation package that runs through to 2026. Most of Mr Cook’s compensation is in the form of restricted stock units (RSUs). Mr Cook has sold the shares in three different deals through the course of this week.
He received the largest amount of stock he was eligible for as per the 2011 agreement, which was contingent on how the company’s shares performed compared with other companies in the S&P 500 – a benchmark that is being globally adopted now. Under Cook’s leadership, the share price of Apple has rocketed from US$8.78 to US$147.54 – a growth of 17x in 10 years.
The latest paydirt hit by Mr Cook – who has got the full RSUs – signifies that if Apple's relative TSR performance is within the top third of the companies that remain in the S&P 500 for the entire performance period, the 1,120,000 performance-based RSUs vest in full, the company said in the filing.
If Apple's performance is in the middle third, the RSUs will be reduced by 50%, and if Apple's performance is in the bottom third, the RSUs will be reduced to zero, according to company.
Apple needed to achieve a TSR of at least 72.26% to outperform the middle third of the companies in the S&P 500 for the performance period, and at least 24.94% to outperform the bottom third of the companies. Apple's total shareholder return (TSR) – that combines share price appreciation and dividends paid to show the total return to the shareholder expressed as an annualized percentage – for the three-year period was 191.83% -- almost triple the 72.26% needed to outperform the middle third of the companies on the S&P500. Apple’s TSR ranked 13th of the 442 companies that were included in the S&P 500 for the full period – thereby placing Apple in the 97th percentile.
A couple of days ago, Mr Cook had donated 70,000 Apple shares – worth US$10.4 million to an unnamed charity, according to yet another filing by the company.
