After three straight years of losses, Howard Stringer is finally feeling some pain in his own bank account.
The man at the helm of the enormous company agreed to accept 16% less in salary this year than he did last year. That means his total compensation for the fiscal year that just ended was 345 million yen, or about $4.27 million.
That’s in addition to 500,000 shares of Sony stock, which is worth 518 million yen at the moment. While few of us can hardly feel sympathy for this kind of monetary “cut-back,” all of this is substantially less than what the CEO received in the previous year.
In the recently released numbers about the company’s fiscal year, it was revealed that Sony lost nearly 260 billion yen.
It was an incredibly rough year, as the Japanese earthquake – the largest one ever recorded in the planet’s history – caused severe disruptions in Sony’s manufacturing operations.
Additionally, the company was forced to take its Playstation Network online gaming service offline for more than a month, crippling its gaming unit and causing what some consider irreparable harm to its brand image.
The price of Sony stock has sunk 29% compared to where it was at the beginning of 2011, before the earthquake and tsunami.
For Sony, though, it’s onward and upward from this point on. The company boldly predicted it could turn a profit in this upcoming fiscal year, saying it expects a profit of 80 billion yen.
