Hot Tech Trends To Watch In 2016

Apple's latest filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) revealed interesting details about the company's executive team and its compensation, including CEO Tim Cook's salary for 2015.

Cook took down roughly $10.3 million last year, a slight bump from the $9.2 million he earned in 2014. In addition, he holds more than 3 million shares of stock that have not yet vested, which are valued at a bit more than $350 million.

Among the other members of the executive team Eddy Cue, senior vice president of Internet software and services; Dan Riccio, senior vice president of hardware engineering; and Bruce Sewell, general counsel and senior vice president of legal and global security, all earned about $25 million in 2015.

Apple's retail chief Angela Ahrendts earned $25.7 million, down substantially from the $73.4 million she made in 2014, while the company's CFO Luca Maestri earned $25.3 million, up from $14 million in 2014.

Ahrendts, Cue, Riccio, and Sewell each earned a $1 million salary, while Cook took home $2 million in cash incentive. All the executives except Cook received $20 million in new stock awards, according to the SEC papers.

One notable figure missing from the filing was Apple's head of design Jony Ive, the man responsible for most of the company’s best-selling devices.

Apple's conference call to discuss first fiscal quarter results is scheduled for Tuesday, Jan. 26, which will shed some additional light on the company's financial state. Executives will likely discuss reports of a slowdown in production of the iPhone, the company's best-selling product, which have battered the company's share price in recent days.

The SEC filing comes in the wake of a minor executive shakeup at the consumer electronics giant, including Jeff Williams being named chief operating officer (COO). Johny Srouji is also joining Apple's executive team as senior vice president for hardware technologies.

The appointment marks the return of the company's first COO since 2011, a title Cook relinquished to succeed Steve Jobs as chief executive.

In addition to those changes, Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing, will see his role expanded to include leadership of the App Store across all Apple platforms, and Tor Myhren will join the company in the first calendar quarter of 2016 as vice president of marketing communications, replacing Hiroki Asai, who earlier announced plans to retire after 18 years in graphic design and marketing communications roles.

[Was Tim Cook wrong about US taxes? InformationWeek looks at the issue.]

It will take some time to see how Apple will be compensating its new executives, but a recent interview with Cook on the CBS news program 60 Minutes left no doubt as to how the company feels about paying out taxes to Uncle Sam.

When asked by interviewer Charlie Rose how he felt when politicians called the company a tax avoider, Cook responded by saying that Apple pays more taxes in America than anyone.

Rose then brought up the idea, proposed by some politicians, that Apple is in fact "engaged in sophisticated scheme to pay little or no corporate taxes on $74 billion in revenues held overseas," to which an increasingly animated Cook shot down immediately.

"That is total political crap," Cook said. "There's no truth behind it. Apple pays every tax dollar we owe."

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