Stryker Corp. (NYSE:SYK) CEO Stephen MacMillan’s salary held firm at $1.2 million during 2009, as profits at the Kalamazoo, Mich.-based orthopedic device giant slipped by 3.5 percent.
MacMillan volunteered to forego the pay raise to compensate for the “challenging business environment” Stryker encountered during the year. Despite the slippage, Stryker still posted more than $1 billion in profits during the year.
MacMillan did earn a bonus of $540,000 during the year, about 45 percent of the total $1.4 million bonus he was eligible to receive. In fact, none of the named officers at Stryker Corp. reached even 80 percent of their target bonuses, which were based on the company meeting certain sales thresholds. Revenues for Stryker increased just 7 percent over the prior year.
MacMillan’s total compensation package, which included an option award valued at $1.9 million, totaled $3.9 million. MacMillan hasn’t received a pay raise since 2008, according to a proxy statement filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission. He’s slated to earn the same salary this year.
The proxy filing also revealed that two of the company’s largest shareholders sold off significant portions of their stakes in the company. First, quite active in moving blocs of her personal holdings over the past year.
Stryker Corp. also announced a couple of interesting odds and ends in the proxy statement.
First, it revealed that MPI Research Inc., a drug safety and pharmaceutical development company, won a $274,000 contract from Stryker during 2009. Wiliam Parfet, a director at Stryker, is the principal shareholder of MPI. The company says that Parfet excused himself during board deliberations and that the contract went through a competitive bidding process. MPI was also tapped for additional contracts in February worth up to $1 million, a move cleared by the company’s auditing committee.
And Amy MacMillan, the wife of CEO Stephen MacMillan, sits on the board of a catering company that has provided dining services to the company since 2006. In 2009, the company spent more than $450,000 on services from Amy MacMillan’s firm, which was not named in the filing. Stryker Corp. said that Amy MacMillan has no ownership ties to the company and that the services provided were competitively priced compared with the what Stryker would have paid another catering company.