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Nokia's Elop Set To Receive $25 Million Bonus After Acquisition

Posted by Unknown on from the surprise-surprise dept.

jones_supa writes with an update on the Microsoft purchase of Nokia. From the article: "Stephen Elop, the former Nokia Oyj chief executive officer who is rejoining Microsoft, is set to get more than $25 million if the Finnish company completes the sale of its handset business to the software maker. Microsoft will pay 70 percent of the projected total amount of about 18.8 million euros ($25.5 million), and Nokia the remainder, according to a proxy filing by Nokia today. The value of Elop's reward is estimated using Nokia's Sept. 6 closing share price and may still change. Nokia shares have dropped by more than a third since Elop was hired on Sept. 10, 2010, even with the stock's gain since the sale to Microsoft was announced. Nokia shareholders are set to vote on the transaction Nov. 19. Elop will move back to Microsoft as part of the $7.2 billion takeover. He is also a candidate to succeed Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer."

19 of 196 comments (clear)

  1. Ahhh ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Good to see the old boys network is thriving.

    They don't choose candidates with successful track records, just the ones who they play golf with.

    From the sounds of it, Elop completely fucked Nokia, is selling the farm to Microsoft, and will make out like a bandit and get the chance to be considered to run Microsoft.

    All in all, I'd say the shareholders of Nokia are getting the shaft here. This is just corporate pillaging.

    1. Re: Ahhh ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      MS got Nokia cheap, Elop gets millions. I'd say it was a success for both of them. Nokia? They got screwed from the inside out.

    2. Re:Ahhh ... by poetmatt · · Score: 5, Informative

      You are exactly correct: embrace extend extinguish, same as always. This is no different. The extend was Elop -> Nokia, and back to MS after the damage is done.

    3. Re: Ahhh ... by eka.renardi · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Xiaomi does not even exist when Elop became CEO of Nokia. And they are thriving. Android maybe a saturated market, bit it is a market that is growing and thriving. Windows phone on the other hand is a technology looking for a market. Nokia has it all, the value chain, the distribution channel, all they have to do is to sell phone what everyone wants. Instead Elop make a decision to sell a phone, so lame, that nobody wants.

    4. Re:Ahhh ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      First, Stephen Elop wasn't directly involved with much of the negotiation that happened between Microsoft and Nokia.

      WTF? The CEO wasn't involved in takeover negotiations? If he wasn't involved then he wasn't CEO.

    5. Re:Ahhh ... by gl4ss · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Smaller shareholders were never asked and they were told that Elop was trying to run the company well and not deliberately tank it - but he tanked it deliberately and is now being paid for doing so. he should be sued, pretty much everyone in the world thinks he deliberately tanked it.

      See, if the board had issued a stockmarket info piece saying that they hired Elop to destroy the firm then it would be all legit - it being legit being directly tied to if they announced their intentions to stockholders. but they didn't. if the board fucks small investors deliberately that's illegal and they of course had inside information that he was going to fuck up the company in various ways - best example of deliberately fucking up the company being to publicly announce a product line as dead - a product line that was selling more units than ever before in it's life, that same year was also the best ever for symbian app revenues for developers - in panic he announced it dead to kill it. Tying Nokia to a shitty "smart"phone platform was just icing on that shitcake.

      That he is getting a bonus for finalizing Nokias death is not that much of a surprise though, since his career possibilities outside of MS are pretty much burnt - because he is a shit CEO, like, he is really really bad at that job while being quite good in taking bribes, only fscking idiot would put a guy like that in charge. I can't see Gates putting him in charge of MS because all Elop would do would be to sell it to Oracle in 4 years(He would find a way, first by announcing that Windows is dead because ,if you count smartphones and tablets as computers, then it's marketshare has tanked and will be 0% if current trends continue in 5 years(insert xckcd comic about trends) and then he would announce they're going to go all cloud with Oracles cloud tools "before it's too late" and then it would just naturally flow from there..).

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
  2. Nokia was RIPPED OFF! by CajunArson · · Score: 5, Funny

    I could have run their business into the ground for half that much!

    --
    AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
    1. Re:Nokia was RIPPED OFF! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      You might not have dug quite as deep into the ground though. It takes special skills to fail so extensively.

    2. Re:Nokia was RIPPED OFF! by ColdWetDog · · Score: 5, Informative

      You need to work on your pyschopathy. Everyone has some psychopathic tendencies, but if you want to understand a CEO you need to embrace and extend (but certainly not extinguish) those traits.

      Stomp on little animals. Steal money from children. Get elected to some office and perform some official malfeasance. Find a trophy wife or two (or husband, lets be 21st century about this). Read up on biographies of famous people.

      You seem like an intelligent, hard working person. It's not beyond your grasp.

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
  3. A comparison by Stormwatch · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That'd be like giving captain Schettino a bonus when the Costa Concordia is salvaged, even though he's the dolt who sank it.

    --
    Circumcision is child abuse.
  4. Re:Conscience? by ColdWetDog · · Score: 5, Insightful

    $25 million buys an awful lot of Ambien

    And, hookers and blow if needed.

    --
    Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
  5. WTF? by Zero__Kelvin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How is this even legal? It is almost as if nobody sees it as a bribe because they don't think a bribe can happen in the open. The SEC needs to put a stop to this acquisition. It smacks of fraud on a massive level.

    --
    Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
  6. Returning to the Mothership by nojayuk · · Score: 5, Funny

    E-lop. Phone. Hoooome.

  7. Re:Conscience? by Apharmd · · Score: 5, Funny

    How does he sleep? On the finest silk sheets, of course. Morality is for the little people.

  8. Exactly like Belluzzo by ron_ivi · · Score: 5, Informative

    Sounds almost exactly like how Belluzzo was rewarded for killing HPUX, PA-RISC, IRIX, and 64-bitMIPS in favor of WinNT-on-Itanium. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Belluzzo

  9. Why all the complacency? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I knew this was going to happen. EVERYONE knew this was going to happen the moment we heard a Microsoft guy was going to be put in charge. EVERY step this guy has taken has led to this.

    I always remember Nokia as being a point of national pride for the finns! They loved to brag about it, being in the forefront of a hot and growing tech industry. Why are they letting an American company walk in and scoop it all up in what is essentially a giant fraudulent business exchange? So many high-tech jobs lost. Where is the outrage?

    I know Finland isn't the US, but why haven't executives been hauled in front of whatever the equivalent of congress is there to explain why a key industry has been sabotaged and sold overseas?

  10. What? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Read the blogs following Nokia and check financial statements. Although declining, Noka was profitable company until Elop took over.
    Then sharp decline and mercy killing by Microsoft.
    It had very bad smell from beginning.

  11. Good news for Jolla by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Given that Jolla is having their second round of pre-orders today (in Finland only), I expect Finns, angry at the looting of one of Finland's biggest and most well-known companies by Microsoft, are more likely than ever to throw money at a Finnish phone maker founded by ex-Nokia guys who quit and/or were fired under Elop...

  12. Quoting directly from VentureBeat by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "A high ranking VP of a corporate giant becomes the new CEO of a company in a different business, in a different country. He doesn’t sell his home in Seattle, nor does his family move with him, even though he’s ostensibly going to be there permanently. Over the next three years, he makes counterintuitive decisions that abandon his new company’s core strengths, and their value plummets to a tiny fraction of what it was.

    You get the idea. Essentially, the theory here — and this has been floating around for a while — is that Stephen Elop became the CEO of Nokia to soften the company up for the Microsoft takeover left Nokia without its hardware business."

    It is so blindingly obvious. If anyone doesn't see this, they are beyond hope. One might quote the Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice....", but it simply does not account for the amount of maneuvering and the number of counterintuitive senseless decisions that made this acquisition possible. What is more applicable is: "If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck,.....".