Apple’s Tim Cook Loses 99 Percent From Wage Packet

The boss of Apple, Tim Cook, has taken a huge pay cut for his 2012 wages, after he earned a record breaking salary package in 2011.

During 2012 Cook saw his wage package cut by an astonishing 99 percent, according to the latest regulatory filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Nice Package

The filing revealed that Cook will receive only $4.17m (£2.6m) for the past 12 months.

“The Company believes the compensation program for the named executive officers is instrumental in helping the Company achieve its strong financial performance,” stated Apple in its filing.

But before Apple fans begin to fret over possible belt tightening in the Cook household in the year ahead, it should be remembered that Cook pocketed $378m (£235m) back in 2011, a figure that was greatly inflated by the reward of lucrative stock options at the iPad maker.

And it should also be noted that in reality Cook’s annual salary went up by nearly half a million dollars in 2012.

This was because Cook was awarded a salary of $900,000 (£559,318) in 2011, but in 2012 his salary went up to $1.36m (£850,000), plus $2.8m (£1.7m) from a separate incentive plan.

Management Pressures

CEO Tim Cook took over the running of Apple in August 2011, following the untimely death of Steve Jobs who passed away in October 2011 aged just 56, after an eight-year battle with pancreatic cancer.

Jobs famously awarded himself the modest annual salary of just $1 (£0.62), but of course the Apple co-founder also owned billion of dollars in Apple shares.

Cook’s time in charge of Apple since the passing of Steve Jobs has been mostly positive, although there have been the occasional hiccup along the way. The most notable issue came with the Apple Maps fiasco, which caused Cook to take the extraordinary step of apologising to Apple customers for less-than perfect Apple Maps application introduced in iOS 6.

However Cook is also facing other pressures, most notably from Wall Street.

Investors are growing increasingly concerned at Apple’s ability to sustain its incredible growth rate, especially in light of the increasingly competitive offerings from the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Indeed, shares in Apple have declined by around 30 percent since its record high in September last year.

There are also other concerns that Apple has lost its creative inspiration following the death of Jobs, and that Apple’s patent onslaught in the courts against its fellow competitors could ultimately end up hurting the company.

That said, Cook continues to deliver impressive financial results at the iPhone maker. And Cook has overseen the successful introduction of the 7-inch iPad Mini, a form factor that Steve Jobs publicly slated, as he felt that a larger screen was necessary to ensure a good user experience.

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