Ronda Stryker is pruning one of the family trusts again, letting go of approximately 12 percent of its contents and setting up a payday somewhere close to $120 million — by far, her most profitable year yet selling Stryker Corp. (NYSE:SYK) stock.
Stryker, granddaughter of company founder Homer Stryker and the only family member still sitting on the Stryker Corp. board, has been steadily selling down her stake in the Kalamazoo, Mich.-based device conglomerate since May 2009. Through last November, she had sold just over 2.7 million shares and generated nearly $118.9 million in proceeds. Her new selling program, at first glance, appears relatively modest — 9,000 shares a day through the end of 2011. But all those shares begin piling up in hurry and will total more than 1.9 million shares by the time the closing bell rings on the last of the 202 trading sessions remaining in 2011.
Exactly how much those shares can generate this go-around obviously depends on the company’s stock price between now and the end of the year. Stryker’s take from the 117,000 shares she sold since Feb. 28, when the current Rule 10b5-1 trading plan kicked off, is $7.35 million, an average of $62.87 a share. Extrapolated through the end of the year, that would add up to $121.65 million, edging out the combined proceeds from all of her previous stock sales during the preceding 21 months.
And it doesn’t hurt that the company’s stock price is up just over 80 percent over the past two years — even with a $4 dip since topping out just above $65 a share early last week. Ronda Stryker also has shown something of a knack for picking times when Stryker stock has bottomed out and hitting an upswing. For example, she started selling in May 2009 several weeks after Stryker shares made a short-lived plunge toward $30 each, only to push back over $40 by the time she sold 60,000 shares May 6. The stock largely stayed near that perch through late August, when Stryker’s first serious foray into the market concluded.
The stock displayed a similar consistency in February and November 2010 when Stryker returned to sell more shares, averaging very close to $52 per share both times.
According to a recent regulatory filing, Stryker set up the upcoming stock sales as a Rule 10b5-1 plan, a program created by the federal Securities & Exchange Commission allowing insiders to liquidate a portion of their holdings outside the normal trading windows by establishing a pre-determined schedule of sales. As part of her guidelines, Stryker capped her possible proceeds at $138 million, which would require the company’s stock price to progressively climb about 11 cents a day, reaching about $83 a share by Dec. 31.
Stryker still will have sole or shared voting power over 31.9 million shares next January, representing a 7.8 percent stake in the company.