Neither Tim Cook, nor Satya Nadella, nor Lasting Pichai, nor Jamie Dimon … the best paid CEO of a US company in the United States in 2024, with the data known so far, is an unknown executive of an unknown company for the general public, although with great reputation in the sector. This is Jim Anderson, the brand new signing of the firm of optical materials and coherent semiconductors, which is not even a member of the Standard & Poor’s 500 index, the stock market indicator that groups the 500 largest US companies. His high salary also had some accidental.
The firm is based in Saxonburg, a town of Pennsylvania of about 1,500 inhabitants in Butler County, where Donald Trump suffered an attack last year that almost ended his life. A few weeks before that shooting, the company announced the signing of Jim Anderson as its new CEO. He launched a press release in a press release on June 3, 2024, which accompanied a photograph. The statement did not make way in any of the great media.
Coherent closes his fiscal year in June, so that Anderson was the company’s head for less than a month in that year. However, its annual remuneration report reflects astronomical remuneration.
His fixed salary of 2024 was only $ 81,538, but received a signing premium of $ 500,000 in cash and an incentive package in shares valued at 100.9 million dollars. In the remuneration report, the company complains that the package was designed to compensate for what Anderson left the firm of Lattice semiconductors and that its original value was much lower, but that when the price was fired with the signing, the calculation system required to assess that incentive gives that result.
“Ironically, the high value of the incentive granted indicated below was due to the favorable market response to the news of Mr. Anderson’s appointment,” says the company.
When the signing was announced, Lattice shares (which had multiplied by 10 their value during their stage) sank and those of Cohers fired 23%, revaluing the company at about 2,000 million dollars. It is something similar to what happened with the signing by Starbucks by Brian Niccol, the second manager with the greatest compensation last year.
The company had calculated a remuneration of about 36 million dollars to compensate for the incentive package that Anderson left in its previous company. But it established a calculation mode with an average price of 30 sessions, different from that required by the SEC to assess the remuneration. In it, the effective concession date is taken into account and the shares had shot. In addition, for a part of the incentive linked to performance, the supervisor takes into account in its additional variable model, such as the fact that the incentive in shares can be up to 250% of the original value set. In the end, a little by accident, the accrued remuneration is encrypted in those 101.5 million, almost all of it for the multiannual incentive in shares.
“It is a great honor for me to join Cherent, a company that I have admired for a long time, like his next CEO,” said Anderson in the statement in which his signing was announced. “With a leading innovation, a leading platform in the sector and intense customer orientation, Coherent is in an exceptional position to take advantage of its current impulse and achieve a long -term profitable growth. I am looking forward to joining the management team and the board of directors at this crucial moment of the company’s history, to work together in order to make the enormous potential of coherent and generate value for all the interested parties,” he added.
Coherent was founded in 1971 with the name of II-VI, which refers to groups II and VI of the periodic table, since the company began producing cadmium teluro, which belongs to those two groups. II-VI bought the manufacturer of coherent lasers in 2022 and adopted the name of the acquired company.
Before joining Latice in 2018, Anderson was a senior vice president and general director of the Advanced Micro Devices Computing and Graphics Business Group. Previously, he held leadership positions in general management, engineering, sales, marketing and strategy in companies such as Intel, Broadcom (formerly Avago Technologies) and LSI Corporation. The manager has an MBA and a master’s degree in Electrical and Informatics Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute (MIT), a Master in Electrical Engineering from the University of Purdue and a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering from the University of Minnesota.
In the list of the best paid CEOs of 2024, Anderson is followed by another signing, Brian Niccol, of Starbucks, with 95.8 million dollars. After him are the CEOs of Ge Aeospace, Paramount, Blackstone, Microsoft and Apple. The list does not include the one that for now is, with 139 million dollars, the best paid manager in the United States in 2024, the financial director of Tesla, Vaibhav Taneja, for not being the company’s first executive.
