12. Howard Stringer was brought in to turn Sony (SNE) around when he was made CEO in 2005. Over that period, Sony’s stock has gone from $40 to $36, significantly underperforming the DJIA. Sony, under Stringer’s stewardship, has run third in the three-horse race in the video console business behind Microsoft (MSFT) and Nintendo. Its TV and digital camera businesses have had shrinking margins, and Sony has been bested by a number of firms, particularly Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN), in the consumer electronics sector.
13. TheStreet.com has been through a period of bad earnings and worse financial reporting problems since Darryl Otte took over as interim and then permanent CEO starting in March 2009. TheStreet has been tardy in filings its financial data. The SEC is looking into the accounting for Promotions.com, a subsidiary that TheStreet sold in December for a reported $3.1 million. Otte has been a member of the company’s board since 2001, so he was intimately involved in the decision to buy Promotion. The Street’s diversification programs have not been successful. In 2009 the firm had revenue of $60.2 million, down 15% from 2008. Operating expenses for 2009 were $93.2 million, increase of 29%. For the trouble he has caused shareholders over the last year, Otte received a base salary of $425,000, a potential bonus of $320,000, and 650,000 restricted stock units.
14. Dan Hesse, the CEO of Sprint (S), made $19 million in 2008. Hesse certainly did not receive that much last year, but the details won’t be out until Sprint’s proxy is released. What is out are Sprint’s horrible earnings. The company lost $2.4 billion on $32.3 billion in revenue in 2009. The numbers look worse compared with the improvements in the results from AT&T Wireless and Verizon Wireless, Sprint’s two larger rivals. Sprint’s stock is down over 70% since Hesse took over and there is nothing to make investors think that the problems at the company will do anything other than get worse.
15. GE (GE) CEO Jeff Immelt has run the conglomerate since 2001 and the company’s stock has dropped from $54 to $18 over that period. The important question from the standpoint of compensation is what Immelt has done for shareholders more recently. Perhaps one good thing Immelt did is to agree to sell a controlling interest, which he said he never do, of NBCU to Comcast (CMCSA). The entertainment unit never seemed to fit well inside GE. Unfortunately, NBCU was not really GE’s biggest problem last year. Due to underperformance at its capital unit and some of its industrial and infrastructure divisions, GE’s earnings dropped from $17.4 billion in 2008 to $11 billion last year. GE public relations has made a great deal out of the fact that Immelt has not taken his bonus for two years in a row, but he made $9.9 million last year and still had a base salary of $3.3 million

Douglas A. McIntyre. McIntyre was on the board of On2 Technologies with Mr. Zelnick and served with Mr. Otte on the board of TheStreet.com

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