Activision Blizzard‘s shareholders are speaking out against how much  earns…

US’ SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) has a report about how the shareholders of this publishing giant are unhappy regarding how much Bobby Kotick receives each year. He is getting a 30-million USD compensation package, and even in the past four years, he received at least 20 million dollars in the past four years. This is why the unsatisfied shareholders initiated a vote to reduce his compensation.

Bloomberg reports about Dieter Waizenegger, the executive director of the CtW Investment Group, saying how Activision Blizzard keeps finding „multiple ways to unnecessarily enrich” Kotick, even when he did not meet the performance targets he was supposed to reach. His pay was first under heavy fire in 2019, when Activision Blizzard laid off 800 staff members (about 8% of its workforce), yet continued to pay Kotick as if nothing happened.

Waizenegger also pointed out that the company’s employees typically earn less than „1/3 of 1 per cent of the CEO’s earnings, with some employees, such as Junior Developers, making less than $40,000 a year while living in high-cost areas such as southern California.” You read that correctly: an average Activision Blizzard employee receives about 0.33% of Kotick’s pay!

„Despite repeated low approval votes from shareholders, Activision Blizzard maintains multiple, overlapping opportunities for its CEO to earn outsize equity awards. Over the past four years, Activision Blizzard CEO Robert Kotick has received over $20 million in combined stock/option equity per year. These equity grants have consistently been larger than the total pay (the sum of base salary, annual bonus, and equity pay) of CEO peers at similar companies,” Waizenegger says.

He also disapproves how Kotick gets incentives for things that he believes a CEO is supposed to do: „There is no justification for providing an executive with additional incentives to pursue a merger or similar strategic transaction when that executive has already accumulated substantial holdings through equity grants.”

The vote will happen on June 11. Still, it’s better than outright voting him out of the CEO chair. Oh, and the icing on the cake: Bobby Kotick has been the CEO of Activision Blizzard ever since the two companies merged in 2008! The publisher defends itself by saying Kotick has been leading Activision since 1991 and that he increased the value of the company in 20 years by 10 billion dollars to 53 billion… but we don’t have to say anything else at this point.

Source: PSL

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